Josh Wolfe

Josh Wolfe (born c. 1978) is an American venture capitalist who co-founded Lux Capital in 2000 with Peter Hébert and Robert Paull. The New York firm, which manages about $7 billion, invests in emerging science and technology and has been the first investor in companies across AI, robotics, biotech, defense and energy, including Anduril, Hugging Face, Eikon Therapeutics, Runway and Physical Intelligence. Wolfe has co-founded more than 20 Lux companies from scratch. One of his best-known bets, Kurion, used robotics and chemistry to clean up nuclear waste and became the only American firm chosen for the Fukushima cleanup.

Wolfe grew up in Coney Island, Brooklyn, raised by a single mother who taught special education in the public schools, sharing a two-bedroom apartment with his grandparents. A high-school internship in an immunopathology lab at Downstate Hospital in Brooklyn pulled him toward both science and markets. He started at Cornell in biology, switched to finance, and graduated from the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management in 1999.

He co-founded and chairs Coney Island Prep, a public charter school in his old neighborhood that opened in 2009, and is a trustee of the Santa Fe Institute. In January 2025, after China's DeepSeek model launched, he called for more American investment in artificial intelligence, and later that year he committed Lux to at least $100 million in biotech and AI as federal research funding was cut.

Wolfe is Jewish and had his bar mitzvah in Jerusalem.