Kushner teamed up with prolific solo investor Elad Gil and Luis Videgaray, the former Mexican foreign minister, to launch Brain Co., a startup that aims to help large businesses and governments apply AI to their operations.
By Giacomo Tognini, Monica Hunter-Hart and Iain Martin, Forbes Staff
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hrive Capital’s Josh Kushner has emerged as one of the most active investors in artificial intelligence, making billion-dollar bets on startups like OpenAI, Databricks and Anduril. Now his brother, and President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner is getting in on the act by cofounding his own AI startup.
Kushner has teamed up with tech investor Elad Gil and Luis Videgaray, the former Mexican foreign minister, to cofound Brain Co., which helps big corporations and governments use AI to improve their operations. The firm announced on Wednesday that it had emerged from stealth and raised $30 million in its Series A funding round, led by Kushner’s private equity firm Affinity Partners and Gil’s Gil Capital. It’s also backed by billionaire angel investors like Coinbase’s CEO and cofounder Brian Armstrong, Stripe cofounder and CEO Patrick Collison, LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman and Palo Alto Networks chairman and CEO Nikesh Arora.
The company, which was founded in 2024, has around 40 employees and a strategic partnership with OpenAI to build applications for its customers, which include 10 of the largest public companies in the world, per Forbes’ Global 2000 list. The San Francisco-based startup has already won deals with companies like auction house Sotheby’s (owned by billionaire Patrick Drahi) and private equity giant Warburg Pincus as well as various government institutions, energy providers, healthcare systems, hotels and restaurant chains. Besides OpenAI, the firm is also working on partnerships with other AI labs to use their foundational models, Gil and CEO Clemens Mewald told Forbes in an interview.
Many companies and industries are clearly overwhelmed by rapid advancements in artificial intelligence—with a recent Massachusetts Institute of Technology paper suggesting that 95% of generative AI pilot programs had failed among the dozens of companies the researchers surveyed. Those challenges are fueling a massive boom in revenue for management consultants like Boston Consulting Group, Accenture and McKinsey, all of which help organizations learn how to implement AI.
This is the problem Brain Co. aims to solve by developing unique applications for a variety of industries and providing a central platform that customers can use to interface with AI software. Gil describes the company’s sweet spot as the “gap between the foundation models”—say, GPT-5, the most recent model powering ChatGPT—“and what you really need to do.” Its applications use foundation models like OpenAI’s, as well as proprietary models and agents that have been developed in-house and trained to carry out specific tasks. It helps hotel companies streamline their booking systems, for example, and industrial plants optimize their energy consumption.
Brain Co. doesn’t plan on specializing in a particular industry. “So far, we haven’t seen a reason to only double down on one sector. Actually, it turns out that at the technology level and the AI capability level, a lot of the use cases look very similar,” says Mewald, the firm’s CEO, who previously led AI product teams at Google Brain and Databricks. “The work we do with one customer actually accrues to the work that we do with another in a different sector.”
For example, he explains, there’s significant overlap between processing construction permits and insurance claims: They require applications that can receive submissions, assess them against a set of rules (building codes or policy guidelines) and recommend whether to approve them. Brain Co. has worked on both tasks.
Kushner and Gil—Brain Co.’s initial cofounders, along with Opendoor’s Eric Wu—first met in 2023 in Silicon Valley after an introduction from Josh Kushner. At the time, Jared was touring Silicon Valley to discuss AI and his firm Affinity Partners was still ramping up its investments, which at the time ranged from a classified ads platform in Dubai to a German fitness tech startup. Gil, an early Google employee and now a Forbes Midas List VC who has backed “decacorn” AI startups like Figma and Perplexity, was a natural first contact.
The idea for Brain Co. came out of a coffee meeting in San Francisco in February 2024 between Kushner, Gil and Videgaray, who Kushner had tapped to lead Affinity’s AI investments in 2023 as the firm looked to expand. (Kushner and Videgaray first met during Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, which led to protests in Mexico and Videgaray’s resignation; he was rehired after Trump’s victory and then worked with Kushner during the first Trump administration.) While discussing how large companies and governments are struggling to integrate new AI tools into operations, the three decided to launch their own firm to bridge that gap.
“We’re living through a once-in-a-generation platform shift,” Kushner said in a press release. “After speaking with Elad, we realized we could build a bridge between Silicon Valley’s best AI talent and the world’s most important institutions to drive global impact.”
They then recruited a grab bag of individuals across tech and politics, starting with Wu as cofounder and chairman and Mewald as CEO. In September 2024, Brain Co. acquired Serene AI, an AI companion for mental health. That brought in Serene’s three cofounders—Dan Ashton, Mircea Pașoi and Revant Kapoor, all of whom had previously worked together at audio-based social media app Clubhouse—to help the company develop its applications as additional cofounders. Charlton Boyd and Nick Butterfield, two former Trump administration officials who joined Kushner’s Affinity, are helping Brain Co. develop its first partnerships. Kushner will essentially act as a heavily involved board member, says Gil.
Kushner founded Affinity in 2021 after leaving his White House role as an advisor to President Donald Trump, his father-in-law. The private equity fund has drawn significant backing from sovereign wealth funds in Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and manages over $4.8 billion in assets, per its latest financial disclosure. As Affinity ventures into AI, Gil told Forbes that he and Kushner have started recommending investments to each other.