AI investor, Safe Superintelligence co-founder with Ilya
Daniel Gross
Profile
Daniel Gross is one of the most connected and consequential AI investors of the past decade — a founder who became a kingmaker, and then went back to building. Born in Jerusalem, he skipped college, got into Y Combinator at 18, and sold his search startup Cue to Apple in 2013 for a reported $40-60M. He spent the next four years inside Apple running machine learning and search projects, back when ML at a major consumer company was still an unusual thing.
After Apple, Gross went back to YC as a partner leading their AI track, then teamed up with Nat Friedman — former GitHub CEO — to form what became the most talked-about angel duo in AI. Through their fund NFDG and their AI Grant accelerator (a $250K no-strings program for AI-native founders), they got in early on Perplexity, Character.ai, Vercel, Cursor, and dozens more. They also built Andromeda, a private GPU supercluster they rented to their portfolio companies — a move years ahead of the compute-as-moat thesis that now dominates the field.
In June 2024 Gross co-founded Safe Superintelligence Inc. with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy, serving as CEO while Ilya ran the research. SSI raised at a $30B valuation with essentially zero product and one stated goal: build safe superintelligence, nothing else. Then in July 2025 Gross abruptly left to join Meta Superintelligence Labs (along with Friedman, as part of Zuckerberg’s aggressive talent grab), leaving Ilya to take over as CEO of SSI. At Meta he runs compute — arguably the most important job in AI right now, since whoever has the fleet wins the scaling race.
For developers, Gross is worth watching because his taste has been unusually predictive. The companies he funds before anyone’s heard of them tend to be the ones you end up using. His public writing is sparse but sharp, and his conversations with Friedman on the now-paused Stripe Press podcast are some of the best long-form listening on how frontier AI actually gets built.
Key Articles & Papers
danielgross.com AI GrantVideos
Spotify Podcasts
![Daniel Gross – Finding Undiscovered Talent - [Invest Like the Best, EP.202]](/images/people/daniel-gross/spotify/4bvl6dqeQTXHSQM2JiHHWL_hu_a8638389b966568d.webp)
![Tyler Cowen & Daniel Gross - Identifying Talent - [Invest Like the Best, EP. 277]](/images/people/daniel-gross/spotify/0kZeS8OPPHyqSlhp7WeFxi_hu_3a999646dad44775.webp)
