Nathan Benaich, Founder & General Partner of Air Street Capital, joins John Coogan and Jordi Hays on TBPN to talk about growing from a $27M first-time fund to a $232M Fund III — now the largest solo GP venture fund in Europe.
Nathan has been investing in AI since 2013, when deep learning was still just cooking in the lab. In this conversation, he covers what AI deals looked like back then (recommender systems, fraud detection, AlexNet), why he chose high-conviction lead investing over the "network SDR" portfolio model, where the real AI opportunities are outside America (defense, sovereign AI...
4:30But can you even make plays with that size fund if that's what you were constrained to today?
6:19... want to go to a local neo cloud or there might be opportunities for you know, the Harvey of some other country that has different laws and different rules and so how are you seeing the shape of like opportunity outside of America in AI?
9:59It's unpredictable, but how are you working through it?
7:25. Okay, not too bad, but past the workday. Reintroduce yourself. It is your second time on the show, but reintroduce yourself and give us the news.
Well, so I started the firm in 2019, but started investing in AI in 2013, which is probably around the time that deep learning was still definitely cooking only in the lab, and most people didn't really care too much outside of it.
Yeah, what was the median deal like in 2013? Was that like recommender systems? Like we're going to bring Netflix recommendations to everyone, like that type of thing?
That's right. So that was the year when basically like Alex at University of Toronto built AlexNet, which was the first deep learning system running on an NVIDIA card.
Yeah, what a remarkable time. So, has it been easy? I mean, you just raised a new fund. Has it been easier to pitch this to LPs? What have been the challenges and opportunities over the last few years?
Yeah, I mean, it's been a sea change. Like in 2018, you know, when I started for Air Street, it was like I'm by myself as a solo GP, super contrarian, starting in Europe where risk aversion is extremely high, trying to focus on AI which most people didn't really care too much about, and then first-time fund. Those are sort of like all the worst buying selection criteria that one would have.
Benaich, N. (2026, March 28). From $27M to $232M: How I Built Europe's Largest Solo AI Fund | Nathan Benaich on TBPN [Interview transcript]. The Research and Applied AI Summit - RAAIS. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3169364/
MLA
Nathan Benaich. "From $27M to $232M: How I Built Europe's Largest Solo AI Fund | Nathan Benaich on TBPN." The Research and Applied AI Summit - RAAIS, 28 Mar. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3169364/.
BibTeX
@misc{benaich2026_3169364,
author = {Nathan Benaich},
title = {From $27M to $232M: How I Built Europe's Largest Solo AI Fund | Nathan Benaich on TBPN},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Research and Applied AI Summit - RAAIS. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {mar},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/3169364/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
