AJ Scaramucci Exits Stealth With $350 Million 'Programmable Reality' Fund

Solari Capital, the venture firm founded by AJ Scaramucci, has deployed roughly $350 million across early-stage investing, late-stage growth checks and in-house incubations — and only now is stepping out of stealth.

The firm is the vehicle for a single thesis Scaramucci says he has been developing since college: "Programmable Reality." As computational power compounds, biology, intelligence, physical matter and money all become substrates that can be engineered with software-like precision rather than governed by trial and error, intuition or manual labor.

"The ramifications of the programmable reality thesis are that every bit in the universe becomes programmable," Scaramucci said. "It's kind of like the sequel to software eats the world," he added, citing Marc Andreessen's 2011 essay. "Reality becomes programmable."

From astronomy to Tesla to XPRIZE

Scaramucci's path began in science. He described an interest in "amateur astronomy" as a kid and worked in a bioelectronics lab, studying implantable therapeutics and the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway, before joining Tesla in 2013 and rotating through Google, where he briefly worked alongside Eric Schmidt.

He traces the thesis to April 2012, when he read Peter Diamandis' Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think in his Stanford dorm room. He called it and Ray Kurzweil's 2005 The Singularity Is Near "the Old and New Testament" for predicting the current AI boom before the underlying technology existed. He reached Diamandis through "brute force" — emailing XPRIZE's general inbox "dozens of times" before connecting via Chris Lewicki, then-CEO of Planetary Resources. By 2015, he was an entrepreneur-in-residence under Diamandis, building the CAR-T startup Cellularity and the education venture Abundance Group. He later worked at Kai-Fu Lee's Sinovation Ventures, splitting time between San Francisco and Beijing.

He credits his parents — chemical engineer mother and serial entrepreneur father Anthony Scaramucci — with giving him "a front row seat to [the] American dream" as the family moved from a one-bedroom apartment in Tarrytown, N.Y., to Manhasset, Long Island.

Four verticals, one bet

Programmable Intelligence covers AI and compute. Holdings include xAI, now folded into SpaceX following an all-stock merger; generative-music startup Suno; AI-native physics lab Physical Superintelligence; and Kira Learning, the AI K-12 education platform. Kira's technology is part of an AI-in-education push in El Salvador, where a pilot cohort of 171 public schools recently posted PISA-for-Schools results that officials and the OECD described as comparable to Germany and Sweden's 2022 averages. El Salvador's national PISA scores outside the pilot remain well below OECD averages.

Programmable Biology spans drug discovery, gene therapy and longevity: Tessera Therapeutics, Gameto, Orionis Biosciences, Prolific Machines, Cambrian Bio, and General Medicine, a chat-first healthcare marketplace co-founded by PillPack's Elliot Cohen and TJ Parker alongside former Amazon Health executive Ashwin Muralidharan, who is CEO.

"You can design drugs increasingly in silico," Scaramucci said. "I can run simulations as opposed to doing wet lab experiments."

Programmable Matter includes Varda Space, which manufactures pharmaceuticals in orbit; Apex Space; Giga Energy, which builds modular AI data centers; Base Power; General Biological; and Northwood Space, the phased-array ground-station startup founded by Bridgit Mendler. Solari wrote the first check into Northwood "when it was a baby company"; it now has over 100 employees and has raised over $100 million. He cited humanoid robotics — "we've seen robots beat Usain Bolt in a 100-meter dash. That literally happened a few weeks ago" — as evidence embodied AI is catching up to language models. "We passed the Turing test effectively four years ago," he said. "When that has a body and it has senses" is the next unlock.

Programmable Finance covers debasement hedges and blockchain infrastructure: Genius Terminal, a non-custodial multi-chain trading terminal; Fission Labs, which tokenizes venture-backed private companies; and Architect Financial, described as the first U.S. derivatives exchange built for the AI economy.

Friends, bitcoin and Iron Man

Solari leans on long relationships over cold outreach. Last July, it backed a $220 million financing round in American Bitcoin, the miner co-founded by Eric Trump that went public this year via a reverse merger, contributing more than $100 million itself. The trade traces to U.S. Bitcoin Corporation, where Scaramucci backed Asher Genoot, Mike Ho and his Stanford Business School roommate Matt Prusak; that company merged into Hut8, now a $10 billion public company, which later spun out American Bitcoin.

Gold and bitcoin, Scaramucci noted, have created more market capitalization since 2008 than the entire Magnificent Seven. He argues "currency debasement" defines 21st-century finance, with the "average life expectancy of a given currency" running around 26 years. That view drives Treasure Trove, the collectibles holding company he launched this year, which has bought a first-appearance Iron Man comic for $2 million and a record-setting Pokémon card.

"I think of collectibles as the cultural store of value in the same way gold might be the physical store of value or Bitcoin might be the digital store of value," he said. He called the market "a $25 trillion asset class that has not been properly institutionalized" and a "sleeping giant" institutional capital has largely ignored.

Andrea Pasinetti, Kira Learning's founder, noted Scaramucci flagged the T-Rex fossil shortage two years ago — months before Sotheby's sold the most expensive T-Rex fossil ever. "AJ has a perpetual fear of Cassandra prophecy," Pasinetti said. "He is able to see things that seem outlandish at first, but become kind of consensus after a year or a year-and-a-half."

Incubation and backers

Solari also builds in-house. Radial Health, an interventional psychiatry chain treating treatment-resistant depression, addiction and PTSD with transcranial magnetic stimulation and ketamine, has raised follow-on funding from General Catalyst, the Box Group, the Emerson Collective and SV Angel, and now appears on the Nasdaq Private Market as a pre-IPO name. The incubation arm runs alongside SALT, the investor conference Scaramucci co-chairs, whose five to seven annual events draw roughly 10,000 attendees combined.

Solari's backers include Ron Conway, Jim Breyer, Bain Capital co-chairman Stephen Pagliuca, Eric Schmidt and Diamandis. "AJ is an exceptional investor and operator — a rare combination in venture," Conway told Fortune. "He has the instincts to identify great founders early, tenacity and the ability to recruit world-class teams."

Scaramucci rejected the idea that AI adoption has stalled. "Things in the digital domain are moving even faster than expectations," he said. "You can expect from us to continue to double down on this nature of programmable reality. It's a thesis that I think has a lot of multi-decade staying power."