Seattle’s AI2 Incubator is rebranding as AI House, and adding a key investor as managing director.

AI2 Incubator has spent the last 12 years building AI companies in Seattle. It now takes the name of the community it built around that project, rebranding itself today as AI House and dropping the AI2 name it retained as a remnant of its former relationship with the Allen Institute for AI.

The incubator was founded in 2014 within Ai2 – the Seattle research center founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – long before artificial intelligence became a household name. Its mission was to help founders with the initial work of building a company: idea generation, customer acquisition, recruiting, technology strategy and more.

In 2022, the incubator branched out from Ai2, and last year launched AI House as a virtual hub for Seattle’s AI ecosystem – a meeting place for inventors, developers, researchers and investors at Pier 70 on the Seattle waterfront. In its first year, more than 20,000 people came through its events and programs.

“We’ve grown so much, we’ve become our own organization in so many ways,” said Jacob Colker, founder and managing director of AI2 Incubator and now AI House. “The community has become a platform for building a company that is deeply connected to how we do what we do – and that was a big factor in the evolution of our brand.”

Along with the restructuring, AI House brings in Sri Chandrasekar as the new managing director. Chandrasekar spent nearly a decade at Point72 Ventures, where he helped build corporate and private equity businesses, and previously led investments at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm of the US intelligence community.

While considering what to do next and possibly start his own fund, Chandrasekar said he saw that it was already being built.

“I think the essence of what I wanted to do was create a community of innovators all learning from each other and moving as fast as possible,” Chandrasekar said. “And it was already there at AI House.”

Chandrasekar was already deeply involved with AI House before joining full-time — he had invested in several portfolio companies and wrote the first check for the organization’s $80 million Fund III last fall. He moved to Seattle from the Bay Area in 2021, betting that the city would have great potential in AI.

Five years later, that case has grown.

“As I think about my portfolio from Point72, some of our best-performing companies are based in Seattle,” Chandrasekar said. “We had never invested in Seattle before I came here, and something like 25% of our investment, maybe more, was based in Seattle when I left.”

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Chandrasekar joins Colker and AI House managing director Yifan Zhang, who have led the organization’s evolution from a spinout of a research institute to an independent entrepreneurial company and community center.

Colker credited Zhang for creating a community foundation and building public-private partnerships with the City of Seattle, the State of Washington and the Ada Developers Academy, with early support from Google and JPMorgan.

“It is because of his hard work in the last year that we have more energy in the space,” he said.

Oren Etzioni, longtime AI researcher and former CEO of the Allen Institute for AI, continues in an interim role as technical director, and AI House also recently hired former GeekWire editor Taylor Soper as director of community and programming.

Under the name AI House, the organization is organized around three pillars: Community, which includes inventors, engineers, researchers and investors across the Pacific Northwest; Incubator, where the team works together with founders from the early stages; and Capital, where it writes pre-seed checks from its Fund III to AI startups.

Colker said the playbook that created the company that worked in 2018 will no longer work in 2026.

“The new playbook is being written in real time,” he said. “One team’s success that week becomes another team’s unfair advantage next week.”

Over its 12-year history, the AI2 Incubator has spawned more than 40 companies — including computer vision startup Xnor.ai, which was acquired by Apple; law firm Lexion, acquired by Docusign for $165 million; and we worked with AI startups Yoodli, Ozette, Roboto and Casium – and 90% of graduates go on to raise venture capital.

AI House will continue to hire innovators from across North America — the organization has portfolio companies in Montreal, New York, San Diego and elsewhere — but Seattle remains its home base. Going forward, every incubator founder will be required to spend at least one month working at AI House on a daily basis.

Colker said the requirement is not a sad one.

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“Community is not something you can fully access remotely,” Colker said. “The value comes from being in the room: the conversation after the event, the founder at the next table, the operator helping with a pricing question.”

Colker has been vocal on LinkedIn about what he sees as Seattle’s underappreciation, and he had no shortage of examples. Forty percent of the world’s air travel is flown on aircraft built in the Pacific Northwest, he noted. The cloud was invented here. When OpenAI needed a computer, Sam Altman flew to Seattle to talk to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. When Anthropic needed a computer, Dario Amodei flew to Seattle to talk to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy.

“How can we not walk with our heads held high?” Colker said. “I think we’re a bad region at telling our story – but that doesn’t mean we don’t have ambition and world-changing impact. It’s just a little bit different.”

Chandrasekar, who bet in Seattle, put it simply.

“I can’t think of a more exciting opportunity than investing in AI companies in a place as rich in AI talent as Seattle,” he said. “If you want to use AI to disrupt an industry, this is the place where we teach you how to do that.”