Investors focused on AI

Alex Hartz is a partner at Shine Capital

Amanda (better known as Robson or Robby) loves working with passionate founders who have become experts in their space. Works with enterprise companies broadly but focuses on innovations in developer tooling, data management, security, applied AI, and supply chain. Before joining Cowboy, Amanda spent 3.5 years as an early-stage investor at Norwest Venture Partners. Before Norwest, she was a sell-side M&A investment banker on the enterprise software team at William Blair.

Founder of Basis Set, the largest seed fund raised by a solo GP in 2017. Lan built and led the Corporate Development Strategy team at Dropbox during its most acquisitive time. She previously managed teams at McKinsey in New York and Shanghai, advising Fortune 500 companies on issues including big data, AI, and growth strategy. Earlier in her career, Lan designed and developed brain training games as a founder and studied human brain functions for her Ph.D. She also received her M.A. in Statistics, both from the University of Michigan.

Shruti spent her early career as a developer on mainframe security, collaboration tools, and data analytics. Post engineering, she was investing in early-stage companies at True Ventures and Samsung's venture fund. She has an MBA from the University of Chicago and an MS from Columbia University.

Ed is a seasoned VC with over 25 years of experience leading first-round investments and a passion for working with developer-first, engineering-driven founders. He founded boldstart in 2010 and has served as a day-one partner and board member or observer for cutting-edge tech names including Common Paper, Env0, and Spectro Cloud.

Eliot’s investments include Divide (acquired by Google), Replicated, Preact (sold to Spotify), SecurityScorecard, Rapportive (acquired by LinkedIn), Snyk, BigID, Front, Kustomer, Superhuman, Catalytic, Blaze (acq. by Akamai), Look.io (acquired by LivePerson), GoInstant (acquired by Salesforce), TrulyWireless, YHat, Handshake, WeVR, Techstars (NYC), and Amplify.LA. He previously co-founded Penny Black, a private venture-investment firm where he led a range of investments, including Anchor Intelligence (sold to Comscore), Spinback (acquired by Buddy Media), Bare Snacks (acq by PepsiCo), Ekso Bionics (NASDAQ: EKSO), Klout (acq. by Lithium), IndieGoGo. Prior to Penny Black, Eliot founded Templates.com, an online software retailer that was acquired 2002. He subsequently worked at the Permal Group, a multi-billion dollar global fund of hedge funds (acquired by Legg Mason in 2006).

Alana started base case while working as a product manager at samsara out of a burning desire to spend more time with earlier-stage founders. During college, she worked at Greylock, General Catalyst's Rough Draft Ventures, and Sequoia's scout program.

Co-founded Xift and later Cuil, two clustering-based search engines and Recall the first history-based search engine over the Internet Archive’s corpus at recall.archive.org, both acquired by Google. As a VP of Engineering at Google, she architected the search serving system that increased the index size over 10X at the time of launch, helped Android scale from 3 million to over a billion phones, launched Google Play, and led the search, infrastructure, and recommendation teams. She received her PhD in Computer Science from the University of Illinois, was an AI Research Scientist at Stanford University, and is a recipient of the Technical Leadership ABIE Award, among others. Anna serves on the Board of Directors at Labelbox among others. Previously, she served on the Board of Directors at Square and Streamlit.

Ali Rohde is the General Partner / Co-founder at Outset Capital.

Grew Dropbox from 300 to 1500 people as Chief of Staff. CEO and co-founder of Generally Intelligent, an AI research company working directly on human-like general intelligence. Previously co-founded and was CEO of Sourceress, an AI recruiting company that went through YC and raised $13M.

His recent focus areas include infrastructure, security, and future of health. An original super angel turned multi-stage investor. Early backer of a number of iconic companies including Adyen (AMS: ADYEN), Credit Karma (Acquired by Intuit), Fitbit (NYSE:FIT), Guardant Health (NASDAQ:GH), Guideline, Notion, Opendoor (NASDAQ: OPEN), Pluralsight (NASDAQ:PS), Rovio (HEL:ROVIO), Shopify (NYSE:SHOP), and Soundhound (NASDAQ:SOUN). Prior to starting Felicis, Aydin was a Senior Manager at Google responsible for strategic partner development and account management in Asia Pacific, including Japan. Aydin joined Google in 1999 as its first Product Manager to launch Google’s first 10 international sites, its first online search licensing products, and its first Safe Search. He then became the first International Sales Manager at Google, responsible for worldwide licensing deals.

Primary focus: computer vision, SaaS, Web 3.0 Previously the founder & CEO of two successful enterprise software companies, the most recent of which was sold to Salesforce.com where Mark became VP, Products.

Published machine learning papers as an academic researcher (under Rebecca Hwa). Founded an AI recruiting company that went through YC and a 3D injection molding software company that was acquired. Helped build Addepar as an early engineer. Served as a Thiel Fellow mentor.

A globally recognized leader in AI, Dr. Andrew Ng leads AI Fund as the Managing General Partner. Additionally, he is the Founder and CEO of Landing AI, founder of DeepLearning.AI, chairman, and co-founder of Coursera, and an adjunct professor at Stanford University. As a pioneer both in machine learning and online education, Andrew has changed countless lives through his work in AI, authoring or co-authoring more than 200 research papers in machine learning, robotics and related fields. He also led teams that helped with two leading technology companies’ AI adoption, as the founding lead of the Google Brain team, and Chief Scientist in Baidu. Andrew holds a Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, a master’s degree from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree from Carnegie Mellon University.

Ashu works with startups across the enterprise stack. He is particularly excited about how machine learning and deep learning are reinventing existing software categories and creating new consumer experiences. And he has invested in AI-enabled business applications (such as marketing technology and HR technology), data platforms, data center infrastructure, security & privacy, as well as online video. Ashu is an early investor in one decacorn (Databricks) and six unicorns (Cohesity, Eightfold, Amperity, Turing, Anyscale, and Alation). He serves on the boards of Anvilogic, Arize, Coefficient, Cohesity, Conviva, Eightfold, Fortanix, Ikigai Labs, Levo, OpsMx, Stacklet, Skyflow, and Turing. 

I invest in engineers who are starting companies that tackle the hard problems in software developer tools and services, software infrastructure, applied AI & ML, tooling for data scientists and engineers, computer vision, and anything else that takes a strong technical team to build. We invest $1-2M checks at the Seed/Pre-Seed/Post-Seed stage any time we can be a lead/co-lead sized investor in a $1-4M round.

Prior to AIX, Shaun was the VP of Engineering, Product, and Design at Lilt and the VP of Product and Design at NimbleRX.

Tom is the cofounder and first investing partner at Heavybit. He’s spent the last 15 years working with developer tool, SaaS and enterprise infrastructure teams and helps founders with their early operations and financial reporting, fundraising and GTM.

Joe Ruscio is a venture capital and tech startup veteran, having cofounded observability pioneer Librato and having worked in monitoring, analytics, cloud, and enterprise software development at leading firms such as SolarWinds, Evergrid, and Motorola for more than two decades. He has led investments for, and continues to advise, some of the fastest-growing developer-first startups in the industry.

Jesse is a General Partner at Heavybit. He is best known for founding Chef, the Velocity Conference/DevOps movement, and pioneering chaos engineering at Amazon. He was the first chair of O’Reilly’s Velocity conference kickstarting the DevOps movement and served as Amazon’s original “Master of Disaster.” He is an avid dev community-builder and technical advisor and holds board positions with Sanity, Mobot, and others.

Tim is the Managing Partner at Essence VC, with a decade of experience leading engineering in enterprise infra and open source communities / companies. Prior to Essence, Tim was the SVP of Engineering at Cosmos, a popular open source blockchain SDK. Prior to Cosmos, Tim cofounded Hyperpilot with Stanford Professor Christos Kozyrakis leveraging decades of research to disrupt the enterprise infrastructure space, which later exited to Cloudera. Prior to Hyperpilot, Tim was early employee at Mesosphere and CloudFoundry. Tim is also active in the open source space as an Apache member.

Focus on infrastructure, devops, open source and security at the seed and series A stages. On the board of the Linux Foundation. Previously COO at GitHub and an investor at X Factor Ventures, a seed fund that invests in female-founded companies (all investment partners are female founders themselves). Prior to joining GitHub, was the co-founder and COO of Bitnami (acquired by VMware).

Michael Yamnitsky is the managing director at Insight Partners. He attended The Wharton School.

Andy McLoughlin invests in early-stage software startups that help businesses operate like the best companies in the world either by building better, selling more, or operating more effectively. His portfolio includes LaunchDarkly, Human Interest, Focal Systems, Fountain, Crossbeam, Coder, Sym, Tailscale and Mutiny. Prior to joining Uncork in 2015, Andy was co-founder of Huddle, a London-based enterprise collaboration platform which was acquired in 2017. He was also an active angel investor with a personal portfolio of 40+ startups including Intercom; Tray.io, Pipedrive (acquired by Vista Equity Partners; Bugsnag; Apiary (acquired by Oracle); Buffer; Secret Escapes; Calm; and Postmates (acquired by Uber).

Mark started his venture capital career when Hummer Winblad Venture Partners began investing its first fund in 1990. Over the last 30 years Mark has been the first venture investor and served on the boards of numerous successful start-ups, including Omniture (IPO; subsequently acquired by Adobe), AdForce (IPO; subsequently acquired by CMGI), NetDynamics (acquired by Sun Microsystems), Scopus Technologies (IPO; subsequently acquired by Siebel), Domo (IPO), Crowdfactory (acquired by Marketo) and Teem (acquired by WeWork). He continues to serve as a director of various private companies. He is also a past Director of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA). In 2011, appointed by President Barack Obama to the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST), a 21-person advisory group of the nation’s leading scientists and engineers.

Prior to co-founding 8-Bit Capital, Jonathan was the founder of the professional news discovery service Nuzzel, which was named one of the best apps of the year by Google Play, the New York Times, and Time Magazine. Jonathan was the founder of the pioneering social networking service Friendster, which inspired the modern social networking industry. Jonathan is the inventor of multiple fundamental patents on social networking which are now owned by Facebook. Previously, Jonathan was a software engineer at Netscape and Nortel. Jonathan is also a co-founder and Managing Partner of Founders Den, San Francisco’s favorite workspace and community for startups and investors, which has been home to many successful startups and top venture firms.

Focuses on startups that apply technological advances in machine intelligence and enterprise infrastructure to solve real-world problems. In her first position as a Research Director for the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (CADS), Sarah and her team used advanced statistical models to predict the behavior of covert organizations, including Somali pirates, illicit charcoal traders, and jihadist insurgencies. She subsequently leveraged computational methods to help public agencies ranging from the US Joint Forces Command to the Secret Service anticipate and disrupt complex threats. Upon joining Mattermark as Head of Data, she applied similar approaches to incomplete and uncertain datasets on private companies. Sarah started her career in venture capital at Canvas Ventures, where she utilized similar methodologies to source the firm’s investments in Fluxx, Platform9, and Kinetica.

Ashmeet is the Founder and Chief Engineer of Engineering Capital. Ashmeet’s experience includes running venture capital funds and leadership positions helping build the industry leading products VMware ESX Server and Silicon Graphics WebFORCE. Ashmeet came into venture from VMware, where he ran product management for their flagship product ESX Server. His successful investments include Azure (IPO NYSE: AZRE) and SignalFx, recently acquired by Splunk for $1 billion, Tubi.tv (acq: FOX). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of Baffle, Concentric, Evinced, Nimbella and ShiftRight. His active investments include Kentik, Menlo Security, Nexla, Prismo Systems, Robust Intelligence, vFunction, and YotaScale – in all of which he was the seed investor.

Prior to OSS Capital, Joseph was an EIR at Quantum Corporation in support of the Rook project which was subsequently donated to the CNCF (its first storage project) where he has also been involved (at the board level, in various committees and as an advisor) since inception. Joseph also founded KubeCon (now also run by the Linux Foundation's CNCF) while also founding and building Kismatic, the first enterprise-focused commercial Kubernetes company (acquired by Apprenda, subsequently acquired by ATOS). Over the preceding several years, Joseph worked at Mesosphere (now D2IQ), Enstratius (acquired by Dell Software), TIBCO Software and Talend in various sales, engineering, product and strategy capacities. Joseph is also the founder of Open Core Summit, the global COSS ecosystem conference, run independently as a vendor0neutral community that includes the leading investment firms, cloud providers, COSS companies, analysts, F2000 enterprises and more.

Bhaskar “BG” Ghosh is the CTO at 8VC, having initially joined the company as an Advisor in December 2015. Since receiving his PhD in Computer Science from Yale, BG has had a distinguished career in Silicon Valley, working for 20+ years in technology leadership in diverse domains including enterprise data and web infrastructure, digital advertising, social networks, and consumer fintech. Previously, he ran technology at Nerdwallet as VP of Engineering, helped build the teams and back-ends that helped fuel LinkedIn’s meteoric growth as its Head of Data Engineering, and led engineering for the pioneering Yahoo! Right Media Display Advertising Exchange. BG built his deep technology and data chops developing RDMBS kernels at top enterprise data-platform companies like Oracle and Informix. At 8VC, BG works with the entrepreneurs and leaders in our portfolio as a virtual CTO, and in finding the next big investment idea across technology domains.

After career exits like Elastic, Twitter and Yelp, Peter Fenton is now the longest-serving full-time partner at venture capital firm Benchmark. The trained helicopter pilot more recently joined the boards of Brazil-based mobile game maker Wildlife Studios, fintech startup Digits and open-source robotic process automation provider Robocorp.

Leigh was an early engineer & the first product manager at Scale AI, where she originally built & later led product development for the LiDAR/3D annotation products, used by many autonomous vehicles, robots, and AR/VR companies as a core step in their machine learning lifecycles. She also has done software development at Blend, machine learning at Google, and quantitative trading at Jane Street. Leigh Marie is originally from Alabama, graduated from MIT, and loves to play poker, run long distances, and scuba dive.

Enrique is a global leader in security, backup and availability solutions. He looks for great people and expects exceptional results. It sounds simple, but it’s actually a challenge to find brilliant and committed founders who also have the operational chops to deliver on their vision.

Prior to joining BCV, he co-founded two companies and spent seven years as a partner at Sequoia.

David Cowan is one of the world’s leading investors, having funded Seed, Series A, and Series B rounds that led to over 30 IPOs. David was ranked sixth on the Midas List and tied for fourth in the Midas List of Hall of Fame. David has co-founded three cybersecurity companies incubated within Bessemer’s offices: VeriSign (NASDAQ: VRSN), serving as initial Chairman and CFO; Good Technology (fka Visto, acquired by Blackberry) serving as CEO; and Defense.net (acquired by F5). He earned an AB in computer science / mathematics and an MBA, both from Harvard University. Today he serves on several non-profit boards including the Center for Inquiry and the Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He is the co-writer of the Silicon Valley mockumentary series “Bubbleproof,” and producer of the award-winning MTV Documentary film “Afghan Dreamers.”

Mike Droesch is a partner in the Cambridge office. Previously, Mike worked with a few venture-backed startups in Boston, including two Bessemer portfolio companies, Fuze and InsightSquared, where he supported sales operations and analytics efforts. He started his career as a systems engineer and then spent nearly three years in management consulting at Navigant, where he helped companies build new businesses around emerging energy and infrastructure technologies in the U.S. and Middle East.

Ellen joined the boldstart team in January 2021, after having worked with the team as a founder at Dark. Her role allows her to do exactly what she loves – investing and supporting founders building pre-product, dev-focused, enterprise companies. Prior to boldstart and founding Dark, she worked in a variety of early stage product roles: at Lola on travel tooling, at Kickstarter on backer-facing projects, and at Microsoft on the first versions of cross-platform Office Mobile. The common thread is building tools that enable people to do creative work.

Rak was previously at Atlassian, where he led strategic partnerships with CASBs and shipped foundational infrastructure like IP allowlisting, a centralized logging platform, a unified admin API, and admin insights, which helped the largest companies transition pockets of PLG usage to wall-to-wall deployments. He likes working with founders who are convicted in their belief of the future while being reflective on their blind spots.

I invest from seed to growth at GGV Capital. Previously, I was an early employee at Dataminr, a $4.1B startup.

I began my career in venture betting on student founders as a pre-seed investor with Dorm Room Fund, a national, student-run venture fund backed by First Round Capital, where I led investments in four pre-seed companies. At Crosscut Ventures, I co-created the first free job board focused solely on LA startups, Interchange. With the support of great partners like PledgeLA, Interchange will help make roles at LA-based startups more accessible to diverse candidates. I’ve begun building a community for women in enterprise called The Table with my friend Justine Humenansky of Playground Global.

Corinne works with entrepreneurs developing technology to fast-forward businesses into the digital-first world.

Vibhor helps lead Venture Investing at Coatue, where he has invested in the following companies: Board: Aurora Solar, Fonoa, RunwayML, Latch Bio, Kurtosis, Unsupervised Investor: Notion, Hugging Face, Supabase, Weights & Biases, Clickhouse, Repl.it, Airbyte, Retool, Starburst Data, Kubecost, Tackle.io, Cove Tool, Bigeye, Lightning AI, Orbit, Edge Impulse, Gantry, Commerce Layer, Coursedog

Danel focuses on early-stage and growth-equity investments. Previously he worked in corporate development at Google on strategic M&A initiatives including acquisitions, divestitures and investments. Prior to this he also worked as an analyst at Deutsche Bank and an associate at PwC. Danel graduated from Santa Clara University with a B.S. in commerce, with a concentration in accounting and finance and a minor in entrepreneurship.

Shomik is a Partner at boldstart and has over 6 years of venture investing in enterprise software. He’s experienced all the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journey from IPOs and acquisitions to a failed startup. And is uniquely positioned to help pre-product enterprise startups. Prior to boldstart, Shomik worked as a growth stage investor at Top Tier Capital where he invested in companies like CircleCI, Anaplan, Area 1 Security, and Shape Security. His experience ranges from investment banking, to startups, and finally venture capital. He first interacted with startups doing venture debt and then joined a startup as the first employee. From there, he continued to delve deeper in the world of early stage enterprise software and hasn’t looked back since.

Prior to co-founding Eastlink in 2014, he was a special advisor (2012-2016) and Managing Director (2007-2011) at Riverwood Capital focused on Internet, software/IT services and digital media investments related to China

Early stage venture capitalist who partners with ambitious entrepreneurs at preseed, seed, Series A, and Series B stages. focused on the next generation of enterprise software across developer tools, cloud infrastructure, big data and machine learning infrastructure, AI applications, and cybersecurity.

seasoned seed and angel investor, venture capitalist and entrepreneur with investment experience in over 500 companies. co-founded a full lifecycle investment firm called Cota Capital.

ML engineer with operating experience in enterprise software and investment experience at the Seed, Series A and Series B stages. Prior to VC, Oana worked at SAP where she contributed to the development of the backend systems used by SAP for its solution portfolio. She also developed assessment frameworks and evaluated requests for funding from more than 70 product teams, across different stages of the life cycle. She was also responsible for the partnership strategy for conversational AI, and executed deals with significant companies in this space, including Slack and Microsoft Teams. 

Investor in AI-first tech + life science companies and co-author of the State of AI Report.

Besides being a partner at a16z, Yoko builds product, writes code and draws comics. She wants to make ideas easy to understand and simplify complex problems for people who are technical and non-technical.

Chetan has been at Benchmark since 2018. Prior to that, was a general partner at NEA for seven years.

Vas joined Accel in 2010, and as a partner focuses on early-stage companies in the data infrastructure, API, and enterprise software spaces. Vas is active with Accel’s India practice and helps drive the firm’s Tech Council initiatives.

Martin was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin was a fellow, and served as senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business by the time he left VMware in 2016. He started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, leading to a new paradigm of network virtualization. While at Stanford he also cofounded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006.

Eric led investments in enterprise software companies such as Confluent and Amplitude, both of which IPO'ed in 2021. He is also an investor and board member at Cerebras Systems, Benchling and Contentful, all of which have multi-billion-dollar valuations. Before joining Benchmark, he was cofounder and CEO of social web browser Rockmelt, which failed and was scooped up by Yahoo in 2013 for $70 million. Vishria, who graduated from Stanford at age 19, led the Series A round in monitoring startup Pixie Labs, which was acquired by publicly traded platform New Relic two months later.

Mike joined Index in 2009, to help establish the firm's San Francisco office with Danny Rimer. Mike invests primarily in infrastructure, open-source, and artificial intelligence companies. He's currently serving the boards of Aurora, Cockroach Labs, Confluent, Covariant.ai, Elastic, Kong, Sonos, Starburst, and Wealthfront. Mike was previously a director of Blue Bottle Coffee, Hortonworks, and Zuora. Mike held several executive positions prior to Index, including Chief Strategy Officer and SVP/GM of Cisco's routing business. Mike managed a P&L in excess of $10 billion in revenues, and his team was responsible for the acquisition of over 70 companies, some of which were multi-billion deals.

Partner on the early stage investing team at Sequoia Capital. He currently sits on the board of Citizen, Jumpstart, rideOS, Rockset, and Threads.

A San Francisco based venture capitalist and entrepreneur. Founder and Managing Director of Caffeinated Capital, an early stage venture capital firm. Specialties include Venture Capital, Growth Capital, Secondaries, Private Equity, Equity & Debt Financing.

Ann Miura-Ko is a co-founding Partner at Floodgate. A repeat member of the Forbes Midas List and the New York Times Top 20 Venture Capitalists Worldwide, Ann was also named the “Most Powerful Woman in Startups” by Forbes. Ann is well-known in Silicon Valley as a pioneer investor in highly technical companies because of her background as a PhD in math modeling of infosec at Stanford. Her deep interest in technology began as a child – her father was a NASA rocket scientist – and her expertise developed as an undergraduate at Yale, where she participated in the Robocup Competition in Paris, France. Ann has also made significant investments in consumer (commerce, curation), marketplaces, and software for SMBs and solopreneurs. Some of Ann’s investments include Lyft (where she is still a board member), Xamarin, Monthly, Popshop, Emotive, and Refinery29.

Zane was previously the cofounder and chief security officer of Signal Sciences, which was acquired by Fastly for $775 million in 2020, and the author of Building a Modern Security Program. Prior to Signal Sciences, Zane led security and infrastructure teams as the CISO of Etsy, and started his career as an early security consultant at iSEC Partners. Zane holds a BA in Economics with a minor in Computer Science from UC Davis.

Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, she led product at Solvvy, a startup bringing conversational AI to customer experience. Before that, she led user onboarding and freemium products at AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.7B). She was a Kleiner Perkins Product Fellow in 2016.

Cat focuses on early-stage investments in enterprise software. She’s particularly interested in data infrastructure, developer tools, and artificial intelligence. Prior to joining Index, Cat worked at Elementl, maker of the open-source data orchestrator Dagster. There, she led the development of the commercial product, Dagster Cloud. Previously, Cat was an early engineer at Scale, where she grew the labeler community and partnered with strategic AV customers. Before that, she worked at Yelp, JPMorgan and YouTube. Cat graduated from Princeton University with a BSE in Computer Science. She currently lives in San Francisco and is an avid reader, occasional cook, and constant tinkerer.

Miles' investments include Segment (acquired by Twilio for $3.2B), Benchling, and Airtable — each of which he invested before they had 30 employees. Prior to Benchmark, Miles was a GP at Thrive Capital.

Sequoia, Databricks, Airbnb, Stanford