Kevin Ryan’s AlleyCorp raises new $335 million fund, all in on early-stage bets

Kevin Ryan knows how to change his mind. 

Consider psychedelics: Ryan—often called “the Godfather of NYC Tech”—was once skeptical that psychedelics could be viable treatments for depression or PTSD. But in 2018, he read Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind and encountered a wave of data. Now, he’s a key backer of the Yale Center for Psychedelic Research and cofounded Transcend Therapeutics, a psychoactive drug maker that sold in June for $1.2 billion.

“What I think about is where the world’s going five to ten years from now, and then we need to make a bet when it’s not obvious,” Ryan said. “If it’s obvious, it’s worth $20 billion and it’s too late. So, we’re making bets early. Psychedelics are a perfect example of that.”

Ryan, throughout his career, has cofounded dozens of companies (including MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, and Zola). Many began as incubations through the venture firm he originally founded as a family office in 2007, AlleyCorp. The firm took on outside investors for the first time in 2024, with a $250 million fund that Term Sheet broke the news on. (A source familiar with the firm’s financials said that previous investments have generated an all-time 60% IRR.) Now, as the venture capital landscape has evolved rapidly over the last couple of years, AlleyCorp is back with its $335 million second fund, the firm exclusively told Fortune.

“From our point of view, it hasn’t changed dramatically,” said Ryan. “We just invested last week in a company [at] a $25 million valuation, and they have $500,000 in revenue so far. We need to help them build that business. That’s what we do, and that’s what we were doing six, seven years ago. The fundamentals haven’t changed much. The things we invest in change over time.”

AlleyCorp currently focuses on healthcare, deep tech, and general tech, and has eight unicorns in its current portfolio (that group includes Rogo, ShopMy, Valar Atomics, and Thyme Care). Talking to Ryan made me think about the time warp that’s been the AI boom and venture in recent years. The AI boom was certainly in a very different spot in 2024 (Nvidia was about a $3 trillion company then, now it’s over $5 trillion) and VC’s grown much bigger by the AI-fueled numbers. I point out to Ryan—who originally made his name as CEO of DoubleClick, bringing the company to 1,500 employees and a $1.1 billion sale back in 2005—that 2026 so far has seen $412.7 billion in U.S. venture dollars deployed into just a few companies. The tens of billions that easily plow into Anthropic and OpenAI, Ryan said, are their own category of........

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