PIETER ABBEEL

Pieter Abbeel is the Founding Investment Partner at AIX Ventures, a Professor at UC Berkeley, and the Head of Amazon's large language model efforts, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Prior to his current roles, he was an early hire at OpenAI and co-founded Covariant, an AI robotics startup that raised $147 million before its founders and core technology were absorbed by Amazon in 2024. He also co-founded Gradescope, an educational technology platform utilized by over 1,000 universities before its acquisition by Turnitin. Through AIX Ventures, which recently closed a $202 million second fund, Abbeel invests in early-stage artificial intelligence startups, building a portfolio that includes Perplexity, Hugging Face, and Weights & Biases. His professional focus centers on advancing deep reinforcement learning and robotics research while funding the next generation of enterprise AI applications.