Seattle’s AI2 Incubator rebrands as AI House, and adds key investor as managing director

AI2 Incubator has spent the past 12 years building AI companies in Seattle. Now it’s taking the name of the community it built around that work, rebranding today as AI House and dropping the AI2 name it had kept as a vestige of its former ties to the Allen Institute for AI.

The incubator was founded in 2014 inside Ai2 — the Seattle research institute created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen — long before artificial intelligence became a household term. Its mission has been to help founders with the early work of company building: idea formation, customer discovery, recruiting, technical strategy and more.

In 2022, the incubator spun off from Ai2, and last year launched AI House as a physical hub for Seattle’s AI ecosystem — a gathering space for founders, engineers, researchers and investors at Pier 70 on the Seattle waterfront. In its first year, more than 20,000 people came through its events and programming.

“We’ve grown a lot, we’ve become our own organization in so many ways,” said Jacob Colker, the co-founder and managing director of AI2 Incubator and now AI House. “Community has become a deeply intertwined company-building platform for how we do what we do — and that was a big catalyst for the evolution of our brand.”

Along with the rebrand, AI House is bringing on Sri Chandrasekar as a new managing director. Chandrasekar spent nearly a decade at Point72 Ventures, where he helped build the firm’s ventures and private equity businesses, and previously led investments at In-Q-Tel, the strategic investment arm of the U.S. intelligence community.

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

“I think the core of what I would have wanted to do was build a community of founders all learning from each other and going as fast as they can,” Chandrasekar said. “And it already existed at AI House.”

Chandrasekar was already deeply connected to AI House before joining full-time — he had invested in several of its portfolio companies and wrote the first check into the organization’s $80 million Fund III last fall. He moved to Seattle from the Bay Area in 2021, betting the city would become a major force in AI.

Five years later, that conviction has only grown.

“As I think about my portfolio from Point72, some of our best performing companies are Seattle-based,” Chandrasekar said. “We had never made a Seattle investment before I moved up here, and something like 25% of our investments, maybe even more, were Seattle-based by the time I left.”

Chandrasekar joins Colker and fellow AI House managing director Yifan Zhang, who have led the organization through its evolution from research institute spinout to independent venture firm and community hub.

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

“It’s through her hard work over the last year that we have so much energy coming through the space,” he said.

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

Under the AI House name, the organization is formalizing itself around three pillars: Community, which brings together founders, engineers, researchers and investors across the Pacific Northwest; Incubator, where the team works side by side with founders from the earliest stages; and Capital, where it writes pre-seed checks from its Fund III into applied AI companies.

Colker said the company-building playbook that worked in 2018 no longer applies in 2026.

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

Over its 12-year history, AI2 Incubator spun out more than 40 companies — including computer vision startup Xnor.ai, acquired by Apple; legal tech firm Lexion, acquired by Docusign for $165 million; and applied AI startups Yoodli, Ozette, Roboto and Casium — with 90% of graduates going on to raise venture funding.

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

Colker said the requirement isn’t a hard sell.

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

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

“How are we not just walking around with our heads held high?” Colker said. “I think we are as a region bad at telling our story — but that doesn’t mean we don’t have ambition and world-changing impact. It just shows up a little differently.”

Chandrasekar, who made his own bet on Seattle, put it simply.

“I can’t imagine a more exciting opportunity than investing in AI companies in an area that has a plethora of AI talent like 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.”