Exclusive: AJ Scaramucci comes out of stealth with a $350 million bet on 'Programmable Reality'

AJ Scaramucci has spent most of the past decade backing companies that weren’t exactly built for public attention. Now he’s pulling Solari Capital out of stealth, after deploying roughly $350 million across early-stage deals, growth checks and in-house incubations. The pitch is big, weird and very on-brand for a man who has spent years buying comics, trading cards and dinosaur bones alongside startup equity.

The way Scaramucci tells it, the whole thesis started in a dorm room in April 2012, after reading Peter Diamandis’ Abundance. He sees that book, and Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near, as twin prophecies for the AI era. From there came the trademark move: lots of persistence, a little brute force and a willingness to keep knocking until somebody opened the door. He emailed XPRIZE’s inbox “dozens of times,” eventually got in through Chris Lewicki, and by 2015 was working as an entrepreneur-in-residence under Diamandis.

His backstory helps explain the style. Scaramucci grew up in what he called a “big, loud Italian family,” going from a one-bedroom apartment above a fire station in Tarrytown, N.Y., to a house in Manhasset, Long Island, before high school. He later worked in a bioelectronics lab, moved to the Bay Area, joined Tesla in 2013 and then spent time at Google, where he briefly worked with Eric Schmidt. That mix of science, hustle and relationship-based dealmaking now shapes Solari’s portfolio.

The firm’s thesis is called Programmable Reality, and Scaramucci splits it into four buckets: intelligence, biology, matter and finance. The bets are wide-ranging. There’s xAI, Suno, Kira Learning and Physical Superintelligence on the intelligence side; Tessera Therapeutics, Gameto, Orionis Biosciences, Prolific Machines, Cambrian Bio and General Medicine in biology; Varda Space, Apex Space, Giga Energy, Base Power, General Biological and Northwood Space in matter; and Genius Terminal, Fission Labs and Architect Financial in finance. Solari also wrote the first check into Northwood when it was just getting started. The company now has more than 100 employees and has raised more than $100 million.

Scaramucci’s argument is that computational power keeps compounding until biology, money and physical systems start to look software-like. That belief also explains the side bets. He launched Treasure Trove this year and used it to buy a first-appearance Iron Man comic for $2 million and a record-setting Pokémon card. To him, collectibles are not a hobby so much as a “cultural store of value,” a counterpart to gold and bitcoin. He’s making the same case for Radial Health, Solari’s in-house build focused on treatment-resistant mental health conditions. It’s a very Scaramucci move: part science project, part asset class, part friendly argument with the rest of the market.