Nigerian-American venture capitalist Adeyemi Ajao's Base10 raises $850 million, assets reach $2.6 billion

Adeyemi Ajao, the Nigerian-American co-founder of Base10 Partners, has closed $850 million in new capital across two funds, bringing the San Francisco-based venture firm's total assets under management to $2.6 billion as it bets on artificial intelligence transforming sectors of the real economy.

The fundraise, announced June 11, 2026, comprises a Seed and Series A fund and a separate Series B fund. Both were raised throughout 2025 and are now actively deploying. The capital comes from a range of institutional limited partners including endowments, pension funds and sovereign wealth funds.

Base10 was founded in 2018 by Ajao and his co-founder TJ Nahigian around an investment thesis that has since been validated by the AI investment cycle of 2023 to 2026. The firm bet early that the most durable AI opportunity was not in building foundation models or developer tools but in automating the industries that run the real economy: logistics, financial services, healthcare, transportation and construction.

"When we raised Fund I we called ourselves the first fund focused on Applied AI for the Real Economy, and LPs told us applied AI was too niche and not a thing, so we had to change it to Automation," Ajao said. "Today, we have several portfolio companies applying AI to the Real Economy that are growing from zero to tens of millions in revenue in under 12 months. That is unprecedented."

The portfolio validates the thesis. Base10's companies include Nubank, Latin America's largest digital bank with more than 100 million customers; Brex, the corporate card and expense management platform; Instacart, the grocery delivery giant; Notion, the productivity software company; and Motive, the fleet safety and operations platform on whose board Ajao joined in December 2025.

The firm invests from Seed through Series B, focusing on companies in their earliest stages. Base10 has created an internal AI system called Base11 to classify companies and automate research, though Ajao emphasised that actual investment decisions remain human. "The actual decision-making and winning is more human than ever," he said, describing an emphasis on understanding founders as people and talking directly to their customers.

Base10 reaffirmed its Advancement Initiative, a programme through which the firm donates up to 50 percent of its carried interest profits to historically Black colleges and universities to support financial aid and expand access to technology careers. The initiative is being extended to include on-campus training, internships and job placement programmes for HBCU students, positioning Base10 as one of the most explicitly philanthropic VC firms in the United States relative to the scale of its carried interest.

Ajao was born in Nigeria and built his early career in technology and entrepreneurship before co-founding Base10. His Nigerian heritage and the firm's explicit commitment to HBCU investment make Base10 one of the most prominent Black-led venture firms in the United States by assets under management and one of the few with a documented track record across multiple fund vintages now approaching institutional scale.