Apollo Projects

Overview

Apollo Projects is a venture fund of Sam Altman and his brothers Max and Jack that backs moonshot companies with fast seed rounds (EmpowerInnovation). It backed Alt’s Series B in 2021 and KoBold Metals’ $192.5 million Series B in 2022, and it is not Apollo Global Management or Apollo GraphQL (TechCrunch; NS Energy Business).This profile covers Apollo Projects, the Altman brothers’ moonshot fund — not any other Apollo — and follows it through its stated thesis and its two verified deals.

Which Apollo this is, and what a moonshot means here

Disambiguation is not a footnote for this firm; it is the first thing a reader needs, because the name collides with much larger entities. When TechCrunch reported Alt’s November 2021 Series B, it listed Apollo Projects among the backers and immediately glossed it as “Max and Sam Altman’s firm, not our new corporate overlords of a similar name” — a wry reference to Apollo Global Management, which owned TechCrunch’s parent at the time (TechCrunch). Apollo’s own pitch, as reproduced in a funding-opportunity listing, names the initiative more fully: “Apollo is the latest initiative of Sam Altman, former President of Y Combinator, and his siblings Max and Jack” (EmpowerInnovation). The difference between the two namings — TechCrunch naming Max and Sam, Apollo’s pitch naming Sam, Max and Jack — is a difference in completeness, not a contradiction, and it is recorded here as such rather than silently harmonised.

The pitch defines its terms carefully, and that definition is the firm’s thesis. A moonshot, in Apollo’s wording, is a “big idea” that is tough to get funding for, beyond the risk appetite of most investors, or too technically challenging, and a moonshot company is one “focused on a significant technological development or complex coordination” that “could have a transformative impact on the world” (EmpowerInnovation). The pitch adds that exceptionally talented scientists working on such ideas often do not have access to capital or do not think starting a company is possible, and that Apollo’s mission is to fund the people working to turn those ideas into reality — doing seed rounds quickly for moonshot companies, with a maximum award listed at $3,000,000 (EmpowerInnovation). That last figure is the listing’s figure for the opportunity it describes, not a verified fund size, and it is not presented as one: no fund size is claimed in this profile at all, for reasons stated below.

Two deals that fit the thesis

Alt is the consumer-facing proof point. In November 2021 Alt raised a $75 million Series B, led by Spearhead at a valuation of over $325 million, with Apollo Projects among the backers alongside Seven Seven Six, Vibe Capital, Breyer Capital, Shrug Capital, Hyperguap and A* (TechCrunch). The sources read do not state Apollo Projects’ check size or its reasoning for the deal, and neither is claimed; the verified facts are the participation and the Altman identification. Alt’s own trajectory — from sports cards toward sneakers, watches and other alternative assets — sits uneasily with a narrow “hard tech only” reading of moonshots, which is itself informative: whatever the pitch’s emphasis on scientists and technical difficulty, the fund’s verified portfolio includes a consumer marketplace for investable collectibles.

KoBold Metals fits the pitch’s technical definition more directly. KoBold, an artificial-intelligence-powered mineral exploration company based in California, raised $192.5 million in a Series B financing round led by T. Rowe Price, with new investors including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Standard Investments, BHP Ventures, Mitsubishi, Sam Altman’s Apollo Projects, and Sarah Kunst’s Cleo Capital (NS Energy Business). KoBold employs AI to find metals such as cobalt, nickel, copper and lithium used in manufacturing electric-vehicle batteries, building a data platform called TerraShed to aggregate scientific data and a suite of algorithms called Machine Prospector to predict subsurface composition (NS Energy Business). Crunchbase News later corroborated that the February 2022 round included Apollo Projects, noted KoBold was founded in 2018 and had then raised more than $400 million, and recorded a later $195 million raise valuing KoBold at $1.15 billion (Crunchbase News). That $1.15 billion valuation belongs to the later raise, not to Apollo Projects’ 2022 round, and the two are kept separate here. The KoBold deal is, in short, the moonshot thesis in practice: a technically difficult, capital-intensive problem — finding battery metals — backed by a fund whose pitch is precisely for ideas most investors consider too risky or too difficult.

What this profile does not claim

• No founding or announcement year is claimed: a Forbes investigation reportedly dates the announcement to 2020, but only a mirror of that article was accessible, so it is not cited, while aggregators say 2021.
• No fund size is claimed: the $500 million figure attributed to regulatory filings in that same Forbes reporting was not used, for the same mirror-only reason.
• No leadership beyond the Altman brothers, headquarters city, team size, or portfolio count is claimed, because no fully-read independent source confirms them, and the aggregator profile for this firm appears to merge distinct Apollo entities.
• Retro Biosciences, Helion and other Altman personal bets are not attributed to Apollo Projects, because the sources read do not tie them to this fund specifically.
• No current status for the fund is claimed, and no post-2023 Apollo Projects activity is described.
• The $3,000,000 maximum award is the figure listed for Apollo’s funding opportunity as reproduced in the listing, not a verified fund size or check-size policy.