Don’t start a research based company for money, start it for clout. You can say you are researching cutting edge AI stuff, but not really. And no one is going to validate your claims. It’s research. It’s mysterious, exclusive, inaccessible, and sometimes it’s expected for nothing of value to be produced. A research based company could be as simple as a legit looking website with some relevant and highly technical blog posts pushed out to social media.

Best part, you can use this clout to pick up a few contracts along the way and do some work for clients with actual interest in the field. There’s your money.

While studying my post grad some friends and I started a very prestigious computer vision research company. It was all presented as a very serious co with computer scientists who knew what they were doing. We had $0 in revenue, and our demos were mostly just us playing around with various off the shelf libraries behind the scenes and presenting it to the masses. This gave us glowing resumes and credibility in the industry. We later got real jobs with big tech companies.