Jake Paul raises oversubscribed $100M for Anti Fund; Geoffrey Woo on betting on robotics, bio, and energy over software

Jake Paul's Anti Fund raises $100M; Geoffrey Woo bets on atoms over software

Jake Paul has closed an oversubscribed $100 million fund for Anti Fund, with Aquarian Holdings as lead investor. The fund runs a barbell strategy: large checks into growth-stage companies alongside early-stage inception bets. Portfolio positions already include OpenAI, inference ASIC startup Etched, and fusion energy company Helion.

Where Anti Fund is placing bets

Geoffrey Woo, Anti Fund's general partner, is increasingly skeptical that software-layer investing will generate outsized returns from here. His view is that the software game is already being won by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and a handful of others, and that the sheer volume of capital flowing into compute makes it hard to find asymmetric positions in that layer.

The fund's forward thesis is defense tech, robotics, manufacturing, energy, and bio-AI. Woo describes bio crossed with AI as "very very new" — citing a recent exchange with Sam Altman, who told him it's still early with no obvious dominant play yet. That's where Woo sees the opportunity.

On celebrity consumer brands, Paul and Woo are deliberately cautious. Woo frames celebrity as a half-solve for distribution, not a full one — product and market selection matter more. Unless a founder is operating at Kardashian-level reach, the CPG upside rarely competes with tech.

“We're in OpenAI and then going down that stack... We just did Helion, which is a fusion company. I think the software game is gonna be won by OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, Google... getting to atoms is more and more important going forward. And bio cross AI is also very very new.”

Paul's edge as an operator

Paul's pitch to portfolio companies on marketing is specific: companies with large balance sheets tend to get corporate with their messaging, spending millions on polished commercials that don't convert. His argument is that relatability and simplicity outperform production value, and that fourteen years of platform-native content creation — starting with Vine at age 16, his first brand deal paying $200 for a six-second video while he was earning $10 an hour landscaping — gives him a credible basis for that view.

Woo argues Paul is genuinely different from most celebrity investors because he built his audience himself, through daily output, before he had mainstream recognition. NFL players, by contrast, don't own their distribution — the league does — and their faces aren't even visible during games. Paul's combination of ~200 million followers across platforms and mainstream legitimacy as a professional boxer on Netflix is what makes Anti Fund's content-as-value-add thesis defensible rather than cosmetic.

Boxing: niche before scale

MVP's rise to the top of boxing promotion in four years comes down to two structural bets. First, women's boxing: Paul says MVP signed Amanda Serrano before anyone else believed in the category, taking her from $500 a fight to $5 million a fight, and now holds seven of the top ten pound-for-pound women's fighters. Second, streaming over pay-per-view: Paul frames the industry as moving from a TV era to a pay-per-view era to a streaming era, and MVP has aligned with Netflix accordingly. The Mike Tyson fight crashing Netflix in November validated the demand side.

His CFO hire, Nakisa Hedayat — former CFO at UFC during the Endeavor sale — runs negotiations with platforms. Paul says the operational edge is simpler than it sounds: pay fighters on time, communicate clearly, run events like a startup. In a sport where fighters sometimes wait a year to get paid, that baseline is apparently sufficient to win talent.