Y Combinator—Former YC president Geoff Ralston launched Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund for AI safety startups
In April 2025, former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston launched the Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund (SAIF), specifically seeking startups that enhance AI safety, security, and responsible deployment. The fund writes $100,000 checks as SAFE notes with a $10M cap. Ralston explicitly stated he would not back fully autonomous weapons, saying 'There are certainly uses of AI which would (will) be unsafe: using the technology to create bioweapons, to manage conventional weapons without a human in the loop.' Additionally, YC has funded 152+ open source startups including Ollama (105K+ GitHub stars).
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| AI Safety | +toward | primary | +1.00 |
| Open Source | +toward | secondary | +0.50 |
| Overall incident score = | +0.429 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (medium ×1) × confidence (0.57)
Evidence (2 signals)
TechCrunch reported former YC president Geoff Ralston launched AI safety fund with $100K checks
TechCrunch reported that former Y Combinator president Geoff Ralston launched the Safe Artificial Intelligence Fund (SAIF) in April 2025, writing $100,000 checks as SAFE notes with a $10M cap. Ralston explicitly stated he would not back autonomous weapons, and the fund focuses on startups enhancing AI safety, security, and responsible deployment.
Y Combinator has funded 152+ open source startups including Ollama with 105K+ GitHub stars
Y Combinator's portfolio includes 152+ open source startups. Notable examples include Ollama, which built an open source tool for running LLMs locally and grew to over 105,000 GitHub stars in 2024 (261% growth). YC has been described as 'a big proponent of the open-source space.'