Brian Nichols is the co-founder of Angel Squad, a community where you’ll learn how to angel invest and get a chance to invest as little as $1k into Hustle Fund's top performing early-stage startups

Daniel Gross grew up expecting to live a traditional religious life in Israel. While attending a mechina before his IDF service, he applied to Y Combinator impulsively, not fully understanding what YC was. He was accepted. He was 18. He became the youngest founder YC had ever admitted at that point.

The company he built, Cue, was a predictive search engine for personal information. Apple acquired it in 2013 for approximately $40 million. Gross spent the next four years leading AI and search projects in Cupertino.

In 2017 he left Apple to become a partner at Y Combinator, running its AI initiatives. In 2021 he left YC to invest full-time alongside Nat Friedman, the former CEO of GitHub.

The Investment Portfolio

Daniel Gross investments run to approximately 28 documented companies, but the quality of the early hits is what's notable. He was a pre-launch investor in Uber and Instacart. He backed Figma, the collaborative design tool that was on a path to a $20 billion acquisition by Adobe before regulators blocked the deal, before it became widely known. He invested in Rippling, the workforce management platform, and in Airtable and GitHub. He backed CoreWeave, the GPU cloud infrastructure company, in early rounds before it became a critical piece of the AI stack.

He also backed Weights & Biases, the ML experiment tracking platform, which was acquired. He invested in Perplexity AI's founding round in 2024. His portfolio has generated 4 documented exits including CoreWeave, Streamlit, Pincites, and Weights & Biases. Three current unicorns: Perplexity, Retool, and a third undisclosed company.

The AI Grant and the Compute Problem

Starting in 2021, Gross and Friedman ran AI Grant, a program giving $250,000 checks to AI-native companies with no equity strings initially attached. By 2024, AI Grant had backed roughly 60 companies. The program was deliberately founder-friendly.

But Gross identified a deeper problem. Funding wasn't the bottleneck for AI startups. Compute was. By 2022, access to NVIDIA H100 GPUs had become critically scarce, with waiting lists stretching months across major cloud providers. Gross and Friedman responded by building their own: the Andromeda Cluster.

Launched in 2023 at a cost of approximately $100 million, Andromeda initially deployed 2,512 H100 GPUs, interconnected with high-speed InfiniBand networking. By 2024 it had expanded to over 4,000 GPUs including H100s, H200s, and B200s. Portfolio companies could access the cluster directly, effectively removing the compute bottleneck that was blocking the most ambitious AI startups.

Eric Bahn of Hustle Fund has noted that the best early-stage investors don't just write checks. They identify what their portfolio companies actually need and build infrastructure around it. Gross and Friedman built a literal supercomputer to solve their portfolio's most pressing problem. That is an extreme version of the principle.

Safe Superintelligence and Meta

In June 2024, Ilya Sutskever, the former chief scientist of OpenAI, announced the formation of Safe Superintelligence Inc. alongside Gross and Daniel Levy. The company's stated mission is building a safe superintelligence, full stop, no product diversions, no intermediate releases. Their fund, NFDG, had invested in Safe Superintelligence by 2024.

In mid-2025, Meta made a move that created a significant liquidity event for NFDG's investors. The details involve Meta acquiring a portion of NFDG's holdings, reportedly over $1 billion worth, providing exits to limited partners at roughly 4x returns on approximately $550 million deployed, in under two years.

The speed of those returns is striking. It reflects both the quality of Gross's early bets and how quickly the AI infrastructure category compressed what might otherwise have been a decade-long holding period.

What His Approach Teaches Early-Stage Investors

Gross started angel investing at 18. His early bets on Uber, Figma, and CoreWeave came from a distinctly unconventional angle: a young Israeli founder who had experienced the gap between what American startup culture knew and what it missed. Shiyan Koh of Hustle Fund has observed that outsider perspectives often surface the most interesting early-stage opportunities precisely because they approach markets without the assumptions that insiders have already baked in.

Angel Squad's global community of 2,500-plus members across 50-plus countries captures exactly that dynamic. When a member from outside the US evaluates a company that Silicon Valley is overlooking, or when an operator in healthcare evaluates a health tech deal that generalist VCs are misreading, that is Daniel Gross's edge in community form. That's what hustlefund.vc/squad is built around.

The Takeaway

Time magazine named Gross one of the most influential people in AI in 2023. That recognition came from a track record built on genuine conviction about categories before they became obvious, and on building infrastructure that removed the barriers blocking his portfolio companies. Both of those moves are available to early-stage investors at any check size.