Ross Matican & Mike McCormick (Halcyon Futures)
Backing projects focused on product development and organization building in the areas of AI safety and alignment, biosecurity, and critical cybersecurity. Looking for fellows who are self starters, default to action, and have a desire to create.
Stream overview
Product development and organization building projects in the areas of AI safety and alignment, biosecurity, and critical cybersecurity. Some examples and reference below:
AI safety and alignment: Technologies for interpretability, scalable human oversight, and AI control and governance.
Mechanistic interpretability
Scalable oversight
AI control
RL and training for safety
Open-weight model safety
AI consciousness and moral status
Biosecurity & Pandemic Prevention: Tech to ensure AI models cannot be used to design dangerous biological agents, genetic material screening, early detection systems, better PPE.
Metagenomic surveillance
DNA synthesis screening
Broad-spectrum medical countermeasures
AI model biosafety evaluations
Environmental deactivation (Far-UVC, filtration)
DIY bio-hardening
Critical AI Cybersecurity: Solutions to novel AI cyber attacks, and securing critical infrastructure and frontier models.
AI-native cyber defense
Critical infrastructure hardening
AI agent and multi-agent security
Hyper-secure AI compute
Securing AI model weights
Open source intelligence and monitoring of large compute clusters
Additionally, we are considering projects that amplify Halcyon’s efforts in field building:
Field-Building & Infrastructure: Talent pipelines into AI safety, recruiting infrastructure, and public communications.
Talent pipelines into AI safety
Recruiting infrastructure
Social listening for network building
Mentors
Mike has spent his career in startups and venture capital. Prior to founding Halcyon, he was a partner at GPV, a VC firm managing more than $1 billion in capital. He was an early investor in several unicorn companies.
Since 2022, Mike has been focused on grants, investments and incubating new projects in AI security and global resilience.
Ross has built his career at the intersection of catastrophic risk mitigation, entrepreneurship, and market research. At Halcyon, he focuses on investments and incubations in cyber defense, frontier AI verification and control, and biosecurity.
Before joining Halcyon, he worked at Bessemer Venture Partners. He also founded Tailwinds, a product marketing consultancy for early-stage AI startups, and he began his career as a tech reporter at The Information.
Ross is a BlueDot Impact course alumnus and a Cosmos Institute grantee.
Mentorship style
Co-mentorship from Halcyon Partners Mike McCormick (Founder, CEO), Charlie Petty (Venture Partner) and Nick Raushenbush (Operating Partner). Nick will be leading point.
Co-mentorship from Halcyon's Ross Matican (Investor & Grantmaker), Mike McCormick (Founder, CEO), and Charlie Petty (Venture Partner). Ross will be leading point.
Scheduled 45 min bi-weekly meetings (every other week). Ad hoc meetings can be added between scheduled sessions. We'll have a shared Slack channel with Ross, Mike, and Charlie, as well as the supporting team at Halcyon. Ping us anytime.
Fellows we are looking for
For product development and organization building projects; strong technical hardskills (e.g., MLE, SWE, math), domain expertise in AI safety and alignment, biosecurity, or cybersecurity. Experience with building or working on a usable product. Openness to iterating, pivoting, and failure. General understanding of business and organization principles. Considerate and works well in team settings.
For generalist projects: 5+ years of relevant experience: recruiting, talent / HR, executive search, or general business operations with a strong people component. Familiarity with the broader startup / early-stage ecosystem. A major plus would be familiarity with at least one of Halcyon's focus sectors (AI safety / frontier AI, biosecurity, cybersecurity): enough to read profiles credibly and have substantive conversations with portfolio companies. Strong organizational instincts. Excellent written and verbal communication. Experience working with CRM technologies as well as basic AI tools: Claude Cowork or similar.
Project selection
For product development and organization building projects in the areas of AI safety and alignment, biosecurity, and critical cybersecurity - fellows will have full freedom. We expect fellows to come with rough ideas and opinions on direction that will inform where they start exploring the market. We don’t expect refined ideas or pitches. We do expect building.
For field building and generalist fellows, we are prioritizing a talent matching project. This includes processing thousands of individuals in our CRM, and finding how they may pair with our portfolio companies and other areas of high priority in our network.
The Winter 2026 cohort offers a wide range of research streams led by experts across AI alignment, interpretability, governance, and safety. Each stream provides its own research agenda, methodology, and mentorship focus.
