The new vehicle, called Q Fund, has already made investments and will deploy capital from , meaning that we know its maximum scale. During a meeting between Q Fund leaders ,��, and a few members of the press, I learned a few more things about the fund worth sharing.

1. Q Fund is happy to invest in companies with long time horizons. With a focus on investing in startups that may solve “foundational problems,” per Tang, the group is comfortable putting money to work in companies that may have extended routes to liquidity.
2. The fund is looking to invest in startups while they are very early. The duo noted that Samsung NEXT’s efforts have focused on the early side of venture work, and Q Fund might deploy capital into even earlier-stage companies.
3. This willingness to invest early—and here I am paraphrasing notes and our conversation—is predicated on the pair’s belief that applied AI (not, to be clear, what is sometimes hand-waved as AI) is not yet market-ready. So there’s a chance to invest in early-stage companies still solving big questions. If one of those manages a breakthrough, Q, its parent NEXT, and Samsung will probably come out in the black.

Q Fund does not intend to invest in academic-style research. Instead, it will invest in companies that land somewhere between academia and traditional early-stage investments.

This is all chat and the like until Q Fund has made more investments.

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Today, , a division working to “transform” the company by “working with entrepreneurs and innovators to build, grow and scale software and services, announced it is running a new fund focused on AI: the .

Samsung NEXT began as the Samsung Global Innovation Center in 2013, hoping to help its parent company discover new technologies and improve its business by investing in emerging startups. Since then, the group has invested in at least 92 startups ranging in category from education to security to health, according to its .

The group has seen 12 exits, according to . Those exits included , a company which develops software for autonomous vehicles. The firm participated in nuTonomy’s in May 2016 before the self-driving car company was sold to in October 2017 for .

In January 2017, Samsung NEXT launched the $150 million to invest in young tech startups working in categories like machine learning and AI, the internet of things, and virtual reality. In May, the group invested in Virtru, a cybersecurity company based in Washington D.C. focused on end-to-end encryption. Its most recent lead investment was a seed round for a San Francisco-based company called , an AI-powered drone startup.

While the company has invested in AI-focused startups in the past, its next fund will focus specifically on companies developing AI-first platforms and technologies. One startup that earned the group’s investment as a “forward thinking” AI company is , a robotics company founded by former OpenAI researchers that uses AI to power complex skill-acquiring robots.

“We prefer novel techniques over solutions that ‘Import AI,’” the group said in its press release.

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