After building and selling Cylance, Stuart McClure's next venture took a different form: NumberOne AI, an incubator focused on applying predictive AI and machine learning to problems with genuine global significance. The thesis drew directly on the Cylance experience — that AI models trained on the right data, with the right architecture, can make predictions that change the outcome of high-stakes decisions — and extended it to domains beyond security.
The incubator model was deliberately different from the venture capital model Stuart had navigated as a founder. Rather than backing founders who had already built something and needed capital to scale, NumberOne AI was structured to identify high-value problems, assemble teams around them, and provide both the capital and the operational support to move from problem identification to working product faster than typical startup formation allows.
The predictive AI focus meant targeting applications where the model's ability to forecast an outcome in advance — rather than describe what has already happened — creates a meaningful change in what is possible. In security, that meant preventing attacks rather than detecting them after the fact. In healthcare, that might mean predicting disease progression before symptoms are clinically apparent. In infrastructure, it might mean identifying failure modes before they cause outages. The common thread is the value of prediction at the point where intervention is still possible.
NumberOne AI raised $13 million to fund this work — a reflection of both the strength of the thesis and the credibility Stuart brought as someone who had already proven the predictive AI approach worked at scale in a real market.