As we close out the second quarter of 2025, the ARK Venture Fund remains committed to backing transformative technologies and bold founders building for a technologically enabled future. Amid a resilient yet volatile market, our portfolio continues to demonstrate strength through innovation, partnerships, and traction in emerging frontiers like artificial intelligence (AI), neurotechnology, and cloud infrastructure.
This quarter, we expanded the portfolio with two new private names, Neuralink and Ayar Labs, and increased our positions in several of our high-conviction holdings. Below, we highlight key developments and the rationale behind these strategic decisions.
New Investment Highlights: Neuralink and Ayar Labs
ARK’s increasing confidence in the merging of neurotechnology and AI led us to add Neuralink to the ARK Venture Fund. The company’s early results demonstrate better signal resolution and reliability, supporting its long-term goal of enabling high-bandwidth interaction between humans and machines. Elon Musk’s long-term vision for Neuralink, including applications for paralysis treatment, cognitive enhancement, and AI symbiosis, aligns with ARK’s belief in the future of human-machine collaboration. Our research suggests that Neuralink’s vertically integrated approach, from chip design to robotic surgery, gives it a decisive advantage in this rapidly evolving field.
Source: Neuralink and Techcrunch.
Ayar Labs’ groundbreaking optical input/output (I/O) technology is solving the data bottlenecks in AI infrastructure. In March, the company launched the world’s first Universal Chiplet Interconnect Express (UCIe)-compliant optical chiplet, offering 8 Terabits per second bps of bandwidth with significantly lower power and latency, marking a significant advance in AI system efficiency. The offering follows Ayar Labs’ $155 million Series D funding round in late 2024, which was supported by AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA. Ayar’s light-based interconnects present a scalable, standards-based alternative to traditional electrical links, paving the way for the next generation of AI computing.
Doubling Down On Our High-Conviction Names
In Q2, we increased our allocations to several existing positions based on strong performance, positive signals from users or customers, and progress against long-term theses.
Lambda Labs continues to benefit from the rising demand for AI infrastructure. Its graphics processing unit (GPU) cloud offering and vertical hardware-software stack have seen sustained enterprise adoption as companies seek alternatives to large incumbents. Our increased investment reflects conviction in Lambda’s ability to become a key enabler of AI-native enterprises.
Lucra’s peer-to-peer, real-money gaming platform continues to outperform engagement benchmarks in the sports entertainment sector. With new partnerships and league integrations driving daily active user growth, we believe Lucra is positioning itself as a category-defining player in social betting. The fund doubled its position to support the company’s national rollout strategy.
Discord remains one of the most culturally relevant communication platforms for Gen Z. With recent enhancements in AI-powered moderation, server customization, and monetization tools, Discord is evolving from a chat app into a platform for online communities. Our increased stake reflects our view that Discord is poised to become a dominant social and productivity platform for digital-native groups.
Hammerspace continues to execute on its vision of building the “data fabric” for hybrid and edge computing. Recent product launches enabling AI workflows in decentralized environments have received strong technical validation. We invested more this quarter as enterprise adoption began to accelerate, driven by demand from research institutions and media companies alike.
OpenAI’s pace of progress remains unmatched. During the second quarter, it launched advanced personalization features in ChatGPT and deepened its enterprise go-to-market strategy through integrations with Microsoft and the introduction of new developer-facing tools. Personalization with memory increases the stickiness of the product and bodes well for the deepening of the network effect. ARK’s continued investment underscores our view that OpenAI will remain central to the deployment and monetization of frontier models.
Boom Supersonic is advancing toward commercial launch, bolstered by President Trump’s executive order legalizing supersonic flight over land. This regulatory shift supports the company’s rollout of “Boomless Supersonic,” a breakthrough enabling travel up to 50% faster than current jets without an audible boom. The fund increased its investment to support continued commercial development.
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Source: Boom Supersonic.
xAI, Elon Musk’s foundation model company, made rapid strides this quarter. With the release of new versions of its Grok assistant and closer integration into the X platform (formerly Twitter), xAI is beginning to show early traction in product-market fit. We deepened our position in xAI to support its push into multimodal models and agentic use cases.
Looking ahead, the ARK Venture Fund remains committed to investing in companies that push the boundaries of possibility. As we navigate the second half of 2025, we will continue to focus on technologies that are not only disruptive but also mission-critical to shaping a positive trajectory for the future of the world.
We thank our investors for their continued support and look forward to sharing more in Q3.
Chase, Charlie, and the broader ARK Venture Team
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