1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Felix Hartmann, Hartmann Capital (Part 1)

Felix Hartmann, Managing Partner at Hartmann Capital, discusses his firm’s investment thesis. This segment triggered an excellent discussion on Human Augmentation.

Sramana Mitra: We’re going to start today’s session with a conversation with Felix Hartman, Managing Partner at Hartman Capital. Felix, welcome back to the show.

Felix Hartman: Thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be here this morning.

Sramana Mitra: Felix, let’s start with a brief introduction about Hartman Capital and yourself, and then we’ll dive into your investment thesis.

Felix Hartman: Wonderful. By way of background, I started my firm back in 2018. We launched an initial fund in the hedge fund space—one of the first crypto asset hedge funds, in fact. It started humbly with $217,000 and was a one-man show. Over the next six years, we grew it to around $50 million in assets.

It was through the digital asset space that the metaverse thesis started to gain traction around 2020 and 2021—a term that’s now a bit controversial. But the underlying idea of the metaverse resonated with me, beyond just what Web3 stood for. Platforms like Roblox, Fortnite, and Minecraft have hundreds of millions of users. At the same time, virtual reality began emerging, especially when Facebook rebranded to Meta and bet big on the space.

That’s when we moved into venture capital and launched our first fund focused on that vertical. As we dug deeper, we realized AI would be crucial in bringing these immersive worlds to life—whether through AI-powered NPCs [non player character] or enabling individual creators to produce content at the level of AAA studios. New tools are making that more feasible every day.

Now we’re on Fund Two, which is driven by two core theses. First, we focus on the intersection of human and AI integration. Because we’ve been so immersed in spatial computing and virtual reality, augmented reality—especially smart glasses—became central to our attention. There’s a big difference between VR, which is more about gaming, and smart glasses, which are geared toward human enhancement.

This led us to our first thesis: how do we integrate AI into our everyday lives? Everyone already uses AI tools like ChatGPT on their desktop, but the real challenge is: how do we bring AI with us throughout the day, enriching our experiences in real-world settings—on the street, in stores, and so on?

To answer that, we’re looking at new form factors like smart glasses, on-face computing interfaces, or other innovations yet to be imagined. The goal is to seamlessly integrate AI into daily life, making us smarter, faster, and better.

Our second thesis is about life after work. As AI takes over more tasks, we won’t necessarily lose our jobs, but we’ll work fewer hours and potentially enjoy greater buying power because AI is deflationary. To give some perspective: in the 1920s, people worked about 3,500 hours a year. That’s now down to 1,500. Back then, we spent about 14% of our income on non-essentials—now it’s closer to 50%.

So, the key question becomes: where will we find meaning, connection, and challenge in a world with more free time? For us, the answer lies in entertainment and gaming—especially in immersive virtual environments. That’s also where AI plays a major role. You’ve probably seen it already—whether it’s AI-generated videos from simple text prompts or platforms like Veo 3 enabling high-quality creation at scale with just a text prompt.