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

Solari Capital, the venture firm led by AJ Scaramucci, has deployed roughly $350 million across early-stage investing, late-stage growth checks and in-house incubations since its founding — and today it is stepping out of stealth with a single thesis it calls Programmable Reality.

The idea, as Scaramucci describes it, is that as computational power keeps compounding, 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," he 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 venture capital

Scaramucci's route began in science, not finance. He worked in a bioelectronics lab studying implantable therapeutics and the cholinergic anti-inflammatory pathway before joining Tesla in 2013 and later rotating through Google, where he briefly worked alongside Eric Schmidt.

He traces the thesis to April 2012, when he read Peter Diamandis' Abundance in his Stanford dorm room. He calls that book and Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity Is Near "the Old and New Testament," since both predicted the current AI boom before the underlying technology existed. By 2015 he was an entrepreneur-in-residence under Diamandis, building the CAR-T cell therapy 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.

Andrea Pasinetti, founder of the AI education startup Kira Learning, met Scaramucci at Stanford roughly 10 years ago. "He basically shared his worldview with me when we first had lunch. He started talking to me about programmable reality," Pasinetti said. "There's a remarkable consistency at a macro level with AJ that also permeates the micro."

Four verticals

The thesis splits into four verticals. Programmable Intelligence covers AI, compute and foundation models, with positions in xAI — now folded into Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (Nasdaq: SPCX) following SpaceX's all-stock merger — plus the generative-music startup Suno, the AI-native physics lab Physical Superintelligence and Kira Learning. 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.

Programmable Biology spans drug discovery, gene therapy and longevity, including 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. "Particularly because you can design drugs increasingly in silico," Scaramucci said. "I can run simulations as opposed to doing wet lab experiments."

Programmable Matter covers aerospace, defense, energy and robotics. Holdings include Varda Space, Apex Space, Giga Energy, 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," Scaramucci said; it now has over 100 employees and has raised over $100 million.

Programmable Finance includes Genius Terminal, Fission Labs and Architect Financial, which Solari describes as the first U.S. derivatives exchange built for the AI economy.

Betting on friends and against the currency

Solari's style leans on long relationships. Scaramucci backed a $220 million financing round in American Bitcoin — the miner co-founded by Eric Trump that went public via reverse merger — last July, with Solari alone contributing more than $100 million. "That story is one of really like an 11-year friendship with Mike and Asher," he said, referring to U.S. Bitcoin Corporation founders whose company merged into Hut8, now a $10 billion publicly traded firm.

Noting that gold and bitcoin together have created more market capitalization since 2008 than the entire "Magnificent Seven," he argued that currency debasement defines 21st-century finance. That view extends to Treasure Trove, his collectibles holding company, 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. "I view them as a debasement trade."

He called collectibles "a $25 trillion asset class that has not been properly institutionalized." Solari's LPs include Ron Conway, Jim Breyer, Stephen Pagliuca, Eric Schmidt and Diamandis. "AJ is an exceptional investor and operator — a rare combination in venture," Conway told Fortune.

Scaramucci says the firm will keep pressing the same bet: "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."