About Us
Where it comes from
Higher Purpose AI Ventures grew from a simple observation: intelligence, human or artificial, always serves a purpose, and not all purposes are equal.
Our thinking draws on David Hawkins’ map of human consciousness, which groups human experience into three broad levels. Our founder reframed it in terms of conscious actions and uses it as a lens on what intelligence is used for:
- Survival, where fear, greed and control drive what we do.
- Reason, where understanding and problem-solving do.
- Higher purpose, where care for others and for the whole does.
The three word clouds on our homepage come from this map.
Each level carries far more positive power than the one below it. And positive power is different from negative power, which needs force to sustain it.
What we stand for
- Positive power. A higher purpose needs no pressure, guilt or fear to convince anyone. Its value speaks for itself.
- Found purpose. We back founders whose purpose is truly their own: recognised from within, not adopted from a framework, a trend or someone else’s expectations.
How we work
We are personal and selective. Every founder who gets in touch receives a reply, and every investor who registers hears from us directly. We would rather back a few businesses well than many from a distance.
Our Founder
Dr Richard Johnsson holds a PhD in Economics, with studies at Uppsala, Oxford and Sydney. He has spent decades in private banking and wealth management across three continents, reaching CEO and board level. He created the Risk-Return Ratio, an objective measure of risk-adjusted return. He also builds AI-native businesses himself, so he knows first-hand what AI has changed.
Read Richard’s essay Towards More Conscious Actions.
The story behind the logo
Our logo is Dagaz, a rune from the Viking age. It means dawn: the breakthrough from darkness into light, and the awakening that comes with it.
Our founder grew up in the heart of Viking country, in Sweden, where rune-stones still stand in the fields and forests and the runic alphabet was in everyday use as recently as the early 1900s.
That’s Higher Purpose AI Ventures in a rune.
Higher Purpose AI Ventures