NAVIGATING TOMORROW

Autopilot is a research-driven investment firm focused on the future of technology.

Artificial intelligence is the next technological inflection point.

Humans are paid $32 trillion annually to write software code, review contracts, and perform other types of knowledge work. AI does much of it better, cheaper, and faster than humans.

We believe nearly every industry, from manufacturing to accounting, will be transformed by AI-enabled businesses over the coming decades. Our mission is to partner with the companies who lead the way.

We look past the horizon

Throughout history, extraordinary founders have built companies around technological inflection points. John D. Rockefeller built Standard Oil into one of the most valuable companies in history and became the paramount figure in the developing oil industry. Jeff Bezos recognized the potential of the Internet early on and left his lucrative job in finance to pioneer e-commerce with Amazon, now a trillion-dollar company. Mark Zuckerberg built Meta (Facebook) during the rapid growth in global connectivity and grew his social media empire to 3.6 billion people - almost half the world's population.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next technological inflection point, and we believe the opportunity is bigger than those presented by oil, the internet, or mobile.

In our view, AI fundamentally changes the addressable market for software. While software companies have historically competed for the $1 trillion spent annually on enterprise software budgets, AI addresses the $32 trillion that humans are paid annually to perform knowledge work that is increasingly automatable. AI coding assistants have already more than doubled the productivity of software engineers, while generative models can create graphic designs 1,800 times cheaper and 100 times faster than professional human designers. Meanwhile, the financial services industry is one of the largest economic sectors globally, but even after a decade of intense fintech innovation, over 90% of revenues are still collected by legacy incumbents, opening the door for increased value capture by new entrants leveraging AI.

Beyond software engineering, design, and financial services, many markets that we are the most excited about do not exist yet and, therefore, have no competition, or currently belong to stale incumbents. We believe the next Standard Oil, Amazon, or Facebook will be a company that uses AI to create or transform a large, growing industry. Our mission is to partner with the companies who lead the way.

team

Max-headshot
Maximilian Friedrich
Prior to launching Autopilot with Will, Max spent five years at ARK Invest, where he built up and led the firm’s fintech coverage and led private investing together with Will. Max joined ARK from Redstone, a Berlin-based venture capital firm. Max also spent time at the Centre for European Economic Research (ZEW), where he helped build the largest database of venture capital transactions in Germany. Max has been quoted in the Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes and CNBC among other publications.
 

Founder, Managing Partner

Will
Will Summerlin
Prior to launching Autopilot with Max, Will covered software and artificial intelligence across the private and public markets at ARK Invest. Together, Will and Max led private investing at the $25bn asset manager. Before joining ARK, Will led a product team at Lyft. Will was previously the Founder and CEO of Pinn AI, a startup that raised $10mm in venture funding and developed an AI-powered security platform. Will has been featured on CNBC, Fox Business, Yahoo News, and various other media outlets.
 

Founder, Managing Partner

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