Excellent comment, thank you for the additional insight. In my opinion - but feel free to ignore it - you either start such a project from within a university, a large company that then funds it all the way through (though the project can still get axed) or you bootstrap it whilst being extremely frugal. VC is an extremely bad match for such a project for many reasons, just when in the life cycle of a fund an investment is made can have a very large effect on the outcome.
Betty Blocks comes to mind, they are funded and Mendix eventually got acquired by Siemens so there are some examples of success stories in this space but also many failures and compared to those two this is a much more ambitious project and much more risky as well.
And I agree that you can't a-priori determine how much cash you will need but you can make sure that you either have plenty or nothing at all assuming that the finish line is achievable in the first place, which I'm not necessarily sold on.
Betty Blocks comes to mind, they are funded and Mendix eventually got acquired by Siemens so there are some examples of success stories in this space but also many failures and compared to those two this is a much more ambitious project and much more risky as well.
And I agree that you can't a-priori determine how much cash you will need but you can make sure that you either have plenty or nothing at all assuming that the finish line is achievable in the first place, which I'm not necessarily sold on.