Jill Chase

In 2020, when Jill Chase arrived at CapitalG with an AI-first thesis, she was a curiosity among colleagues. The fund had spent years making growth-stage bets on enterprise software - Stripe, Robinhood, Duolingo. AI was still a research department problem, not a portfolio construction problem. Chase decided anyway. She spent her first months studying under Jeff Dean, Google Brain's chief scientist, building fluency in a language most investors were still treating as a foreign tongue.

She didn't come from the analyst track. Before CapitalG, Chase had built Nimble as part of Y Combinator's Summer 2017 batch - experiencing, firsthand, what it feels like when a pitch deck meets reality at 11pm the night before a board meeting. Before that, she ran Interlaced as CEO, a PE-backed IT managed services company. She has operated inside the machine she now funds. That combination - the operating scars, the technical depth, the ability to skip half a founder's pitch because she already understands the architecture - is what makes her a different kind of growth investor.

The portfolio she has built since 2020 reads like a who's-who of the AI infrastructure and applications stack: Baseten (AI model inference at scale), LangChain (the orchestration layer millions of developers use), Physical Intelligence (general-purpose robotics AI), Abridge (AI for clinical documentation), Magic (autonomous software engineering), /dev/agents (agentic AI infrastructure), and Motif. She also led CapitalG's participation in Rippling and Canva, two of the most closely-watched growth-stage names in tech.

On Rippling's performance, she is characteristically precise rather than vague: the company's net dollar retention is, in her words, "truly, like nothing you've ever seen." She attributes it to a foundational architectural decision - a shared data layer for permissions and employee graphs that lets Rippling expand across modules in ways single-purpose HR competitors simply cannot replicate. That is the level of product analysis she brings to due diligence at the growth stage.

In January 2026, CapitalG made it official. Chase and Alex Nichols were named General Partners - the first internal promotions in the firm's 13-year history. A firm that had never once elevated someone from within did it for the first time, twice, simultaneously. The announcement landed quietly in terms of press volume but loudly in terms of what it says about the direction CapitalG is heading: leaning harder into AI, leaning harder into operators, and building a collaborative team model rather than the old "go win your own deals" ethos that defined an earlier generation of VC.

Chase's path to venture capital is less "finance to investing" and more "build, break, run, then fund." She graduated magna cum laude from Williams College with a dual degree in economics and psychology, captaining the women's basketball team - a combination that tells you something about how she operates under pressure. She then earned an MBA from Stanford GSB, where she's been a guest lecturer since 2019.

Before CapitalG, she worked as an Operating Executive at Alpine Investors, then ran Interlaced as CEO. In 2017, she co-founded Nimble through Y Combinator's Summer batch. Having been the person pitching, the person running, and the person accountable for payroll changes how you evaluate founders. Chase brings all of that into every term sheet.