Base10 Partners closes $850M fund focused on AI automation for the real economy

Base10 Partners closes $850M fund, bringing AUM to $2.6B

Base10 Partners has closed an $850M fund, bringing total assets under management to $2.6 billion. The San Francisco-based firm, co-founded by Ade Ajao, has invested in AI automation for the real economy since 2018, with a focus on logistics, transportation, and food service.

Origins and thesis

Ajao's path to venture runs through an unusual founding story. He built what became the dominant social network in Spain, starting in college in Madrid in 2005, selling to Telefónica in 2010 when the platform accounted for roughly 60% of daily internet traffic in the country. The exit price was around $100 million, which Ajao notes was a landmark deal at the time and would barely register as a seed round today.

When Base10 launched in 2018, Ajao pitched LPs on "applied AI for the real economy." The response was skepticism — LPs didn't think applied AI was a coherent category. The firm rebranded the concept as automation and stayed the course. That positioning looks considerably less contrarian now.

“We invest in automation for the real economy. When we launched the fund in 2018, we actually said we're going to invest in applied AI for the real economy. The feedback from the LPs was like, applied AI is not a thing. We have $2,600,000,000 in assets. We raised $850,000,000.”

Investment approach

Base10 targets companies applying AI to sectors like logistics and restaurants, where the end customer doesn't care about model architecture. Ajao frames it plainly: operators want packages moved, invoices collected, and costs held down. The firm is deliberately agnostic on business model labels — AI-enabled services, AI-first software, outcome-based pricing — arguing that multiple models will work and the landscape is changing too fast to bet on one structure.

The Blank Street Coffee investment captures the firm's people-first instincts. Ajao says the pitch was less about coffee market size and more about two immigrant founders building technology to empower the immigrant-owned coffee cart economy in New York, where he estimates 80% of carts are operated by immigrants.

Deployment discipline

On pacing, Base10 has held to a two-and-a-half to three-year deployment window across all its funds and plans to maintain that with this raise. Ajao is openly tempted to accelerate, particularly during Y Combinator demo week, but argues that maintaining a feedback loop matters more than maximizing early exposure. With AI capability shifting as fast as it is, the firm wants capital available to back companies that emerge in year four and five of the cycle, not just the ones visible today.