Breakout Ventures closes $114m Fund III to back AI-powered science startups

The San Francisco firm has closed its third fund at $114 million, its largest to date, betting that AI and biology are now inseparable, and that the founders who understand both will build the companies that matter most.

Lindy Fishburne started Breakout in a somewhat unusual place: inside the Thiel Foundation, running a grant programme called Breakout Labs that handed speculative cheques to scientist-entrepreneurs working on problems too radical for traditional venture capital and too commercially oriented for academic funding. That was 2011.

By 2016 it was obvious that some of these companies needed more than grants. In 2017, Fishburne and her colleague Julia Moore closed a $60 million venture fund. In 2021 they raised $112.5 million. On Tuesday, the firm announced the close of Fund III at $114 million, its largest to date.

Breakout Ventures describes Fund III as AI-focused, which in 2026 is ...