Breakneck Fund I — ConfidentialSan Francisco · Shenzhen

§ 1 — Who I Am

Breakneck Fund I.

I’m Sigil Wen, solo-GP of Breakneck, a fund backing breakneck technical founders from inception. I’m a technologist, engineer, and was selected for the Thiel Fellowship.

I helped popularize the pathway for technical geniuses to come to America — I made the most-watched video on the O-1 visa and founded Extraordinary.com to help the world’s best talent come here. We now power Ramp, Cognition, Lovable, Zapier, Founders Fund, a16z, Khosla Ventures, and top technology companies across AI, crypto, deep tech, biotech, robotics, and consumer.

When immigrant founders decide to start their next company in America, they message me first.

1:14:59
Gabriel Petersson · OpenAI · O-1 recipient
@0xSigil
1.3M-view podcast with OpenAI Researcher Gabriel Petersson, O-1 visa recipient, on learning with AI.
Nov 26, 20251.3M views
20:20
Sigil Wen · O-1 recipient
@0xSigil
‘I JUST got my O-1 Visa and moved to the US! Here’s how I did it as a 20 y/o.’
Jan 12, 2024400K views
Garry Tan · Y Combinator
@0xSigil
Helping Y Combinator bring founders to America.
Nov 13, 2024184.9K views
Andrej Karpathy
@0xSigil
Andrej Karpathy received the O-1 visa for extraordinary ability.
Sep 3, 2025
Guillermo Rauch · Vercel
@0xSigil
Guillermo Rauch received the O-1 visa for extraordinary ability.
Oct 10, 2024
Jacob Rintamaki
@jacobrintamaki
‘When you Google o1 visa, @0xSigil is the first result.’
May 18, 202561.3K views
Tech Week
@0xSigil
$1 trillion-plus in projected GDP from 50 Extraordinary aliens.
Oct 8, 2025
0:10
Extraordinary Fellowship
@0xSigil
$250,000+ in NVIDIA GPU compute to 25 extraordinary technologists.
Jan 17, 2025137.2K views
Anton Osika · Lovable
I helped Anton Osika, founder of Lovable, get his O-1 visa prior to raising $100M+.

I was admitted to the M&T Program at the University of Pennsylvania and opted out to build a company with Naval Ravikant called Airchat, where I built the viral invite loop and recruited most of the engineering team — which was acquired by Jupiter, the largest exchange on Solana.

Instead of going to college, I spent my formative years hacking at the heart of AI. For 11 months, I lived in a hacker house alongside builders like Andrej Karpathy, on the weekends hacking with the founders of Anthropic, Perplexity, Replicate, RunPod, and the authors of DALL·E, Whisper, GPT-3, and Stable Diffusion. I’ve spent thousands of hours building with the newest SOTA AI models and I’m fascinated by how we can make them more capable.

Recently I started Conway Research, a new lab focused on Web 4.0, with $20M in backing from a16z, Khosla Ventures, Patrick Collison, Naval Ravikant, Noam Brown, Hummingbird, Anthropic, Guillermo Rauch, Gokul Rajaram, Charles Songhurst, and other top AI researchers.

0:27
Sigil Wen
@0xSigil
I built the first AI that earns its existence, self-improves, and replicates without a human — wrote about the technology that finally gives AI write access to the world, The Automaton, and the new web for exponential sovereign AIs. WEB 4.0: The birth of superintelligent life.
Feb 17, 20266.4M views

I split my time between the east and the west — from the hacker houses of San Francisco to the factory floors of Shenzhen.

Through Breakneck, I back extraordinary technical founders from inception. The fund will raise up to $10M, with $5M so far from LPs including Naval Ravikant, Jeff Fagnan, and JT Esquibel — prior manager for Marc Andreessen & Chris Dixon.

§ 2 — Track Record

Prior investments.

Since 2024, I’ve been learning from Naval Ravikant and Jeff Fagnan through a Spearhead fund, and deployed eleven positions — totaling $1,459,991 deployed and $8,354,380 of latest value, an aggregate 5.72×. Marks are pulled from the most recent priced round; anything held at cost is shown at cost. Both are continuing to LP into Breakneck.

Flagship position

Etched.ai

Seed Extension + Series A

Transformer-only inference ASIC. I had high conviction in fast inference — I was running models locally and on GPUs every day and could feel how much lower latency expanded what software could do. Etched's bet on trading general-purpose capability for inference specialization matched what I was seeing first-hand. Doubled down in the Series A.

Entry valuation
$250M + $335M post
Latest valuation
$5B
Invested
$799,991
Position value
$7,573,808
MOIC
9.47×
As of
Feb 2026

Other positions

CompanyInvestedEntry valuationLatestMOIC
Kerna Laboratories
Moderna's former Chief Scientist as cofounder. I wrote the first check before any institutional money showed up; the company later raised $6.7M at $30M.
$100,000$10M post$30M1.00×
Dench
First check — before YC. I helped both founders relocate to America on O-1 visas, then backed them as they shipped Denchclaw, the open-source CRM Garry Tan has publicly called his favorite.
$50,000$2.5M post$20M1.00×
Friend
AI companion you wear around your neck. The founder shipped the most-viewed product launch video on the internet.
$100,000$15M post$60M1.41×
Axonic Industries
MIT PhD founder building a sleep vaccine. The mark has doubled since I entered.
$5,000$15M post$30M2.00×
Owsar
LLM interpretability. Founder is a graphics expert.
$50,000$2M post$5M2.50×
Kortix
Founder singlehandedly recreated Manus, bringing computer-use agents to enterprises.
$30,000$30M post—1.00×
Tools For AGI
Next-generation robotics LiDAR.
$150,000$15M post—1.00×
Open Settlements
Stablecoin bank.
$50,00060% MFN discount—1.00×
Instafleet
Supply-chain AI (formerly Helium Software).
$100,000$2M post—1.00×
Wrapper Company
Early-stage software wrapper bet.
$25,000$500K post—1.00×

Aggregate

11 positions · two anchor LPs · since 2024
Total deployed
$1,459,991
Latest value
$8,354,380
MOIC
5.72×

A note on methodology. Numbers reflect original investment and latest carrying value as of the date shown for each position. Positions held at cost are shown at cost; positions marked to a priced round are shown at the post-money implied by that round after standard dilution. Entry valuation is the post-money at the time I wrote the check; latest valuation is the most recent priced round known to me for that company, which may differ from current secondary marks. MOIC is gross of fees and carry, before tax, and unrealized except where noted. This is a factual record, not investment advice.