Savant Ventures Research
Overview
Savant (Savant Ventures, Savant VC) is a San Francisco early-stage fund and founder ecosystem focused on Physical AI, which it describes as the path toward "Physical AGI". It was founded in 2024 by Jeson Lee Junzhen, who runs it as founder and general partner (his X bio says solo GP), with two venture partners, Adeel Zaman and Ashis Ghosh. The firm's tagline is "first checks to exceptional founders pursuing good quests", and its manifesto is openly inspired by the Founders Fund essay "Choose Good Quests". The pitch is that too much technical talent is spent on incremental SaaS and AI wrappers, and that the most capable builders have a duty to work on hard, foundational problems.
Investment Thesis
Savant invests across the whole Physical AI stack. Its site lays this out as a deployment stack (field operations, fleet management, maintenance, teleoperation), embodiment (quadrupeds, humanoids, bimanual arms), intelligence (LLMs, VLAs, world action models), training (robotics data, simulation, world models, digital twins, evaluation), hardware and sensors (actuators, tactile, dexterous end-effectors) and infrastructure (energy, compute, chips, critical minerals). Press coverage describes the focus as robotics, space, defense and AGI infrastructure. Its public Requests for Good Quests (2026) list gives the most concrete view of the thesis: energy for an AGI world, autonomous living factories for defense hardware, energy systems and critical materials, robots that learn in production, mining and rare earth sovereignty, continual learning systems, tactile understanding and data, AI-native full-stack hardware products, continuous robotic maintenance of infrastructure, schools for robots, robotic experimentation for physical discovery, predictive testing and simulation, and remote intelligence over LEO satellite links. Each quest is written by a named partner, so the partners' own interests are visible.
Stage Focus and Check Size
Savant is a pre-seed fund. Its FAQ says it writes first checks of up to $600K in pre-seed rounds. Ashis Ghosh's LinkedIn gives a typical range of $250K to $500K, and a humanoid.guide report describes a $3 million seed programme with rolling admission. It is also an accelerator of sorts: the Savant Residency is a three-month, equity-free, no-IP program for pre-idea builders based in San Francisco, run out of a 6,200 square foot hardware lab in the Mission (CNC, 3D printers, soldering, laser cutter, podcast room, event space with a stage). Residents are asked only to be active community members and to give Savant a chance to hear their pitch if they raise. The firm does not promise or require an investment.
Lead Tendency and Decision Process
Savant describes itself as writing first checks, which suggests it often goes in first at pre-seed, but no source names a lead on a specific round, so lead tendency is recorded as unknown. Decisions appear to sit with the solo GP, with the venture partners bringing sector expertise. Applications are open to anyone through a Fillout form; no warm intro is needed, and applications are read on a rolling basis.
Fund Status
A Form D filing for Savant Fund I, LP lists a $25 million offering target. Private Equity International and Venture Capital Journal reported on 25 November 2025 that the debut fund had $735,000 raised from five investors at the time of the filing. The firm also ran Epoch 1, a first residency cohort of twelve founders that Lee says raised more than $10M combined, with some closing pre-seed rounds within 72 hours of demo day (June 2025). Epoch 2 was teased afterward. Savant is actively investing: Run Robotics announced an investment from Savant in July 2026.
Portfolio
The website has no portfolio page (savantvc.com/portfolio returns 404). The only portfolio company confirmed by a primary source is Run Robotics, which builds the debugging and evaluation layer for robot learning and announced Savant's investment on 19 July 2026. Lee has also referred publicly to a recent pre-seed investment in another robotics team, but did not name it in a source that could be verified, so it is not listed. Epoch 1 alumni are individuals rather than named companies on the sources found. This portfolio list should be treated as incomplete.
Team
- Jeson Lee Junzhen, Founder and General Partner: product manager and entrepreneur who earlier did work for clients including Mercedes, Quanergy, Uber and Starsky Robotics. Runs the SF lab, the Choose Good Quests speaker series and the Saturday robotics paper reading club.
- Adeel Zaman, Venture Partner: leads the AGI infrastructure focus. Founder and CEO of Grizzly (robots), previously CTO and co-founder of DOZR and founder and CTO of Navi.
- Ashis Ghosh, Venture Partner: leads the robotics focus. Founding robotics engineer at The Bot Company and co-founder and former CTO of Peanut Robotics.
- April Liu is listed on LinkedIn as chief of staff.
Community and Events
Savant hosts two to three events a month at its lab, including the Choose Good Quests series. Past speakers include Shahin Farshchi of Lux Capital, Keenan Wyrobek of Zipline, Bilal Zuberi of Red Glass Ventures, Ali Tamaseb of DCVC, Adam Draper of Boost VC, Adrian Macneil of Foxglove, Suraj Nair of Physical Intelligence, Benjamin Bolte of K-Scale Labs and, on 9 October 2026, Jason Ma of Dyna Robotics. Residents have come from Google DeepMind, Meta Superintelligence, 1X, Waymo, Aurora, Cruise, Dyna Robotics, Physical Intelligence and SpaceX.
Founder Preferences
Savant screens for high agency, deep mission alignment and long-term thinking. It wants highly technical builders, often from frontier labs and robotics companies, who are early (leaving a job within two months or exploring full-time) and pursuing hard, important problems. It is openly hostile to derivative SaaS and agent-wrapper companies. Residents must be in San Francisco in person.
Geographic Focus
San Francisco Bay Area, with in-person residency required. Investment geography beyond that is not stated.
Gaps
AUM is not known. Only $735K was reported raised against a $25M target as of the filing, so no AUM figure is recorded. The portfolio is thin and should be refreshed when Savant publishes one.