8vc
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John Bertrand Built the Bridge AI Needed to Leave the Lab
His career is a study in the unglamorous work that makes ambitious technology usable: translate the science, earn trust, fit the workflow, and give the team a next step by Monday.
Akash Raju
He made Forbes 30 Under 30 for a company he then threw away. The second version of Glimpse - AI that fights retail's most boring, most expensive fee - just raised $35 million.
Anjali Sardana
Anjali Sardana is the 24-year-old founder and CEO of Pronto, a Bengaluru-based instant home-services startup that brings household help - sweeping, mopping, dishwashing, laundry - to a customer's door in about ten minutes. A Georgetown biology graduate and former investor at Bain Capital and 8VC, she launched Pronto in 2025 and scaled it from roughly 1,000 daily bookings to more than 25,000 within a year, reaching a $200 million valuation with backing from Epiq Capital, General Catalyst, Bain Capital Ventures and Lachy Groom. Her stated mission is less about speed than dignity: giving India's invisible domestic workforce a formal identity, real pay, and standing.
John Tenet
John Tenet is the co-founder and CEO of CHAOS Industries, a Los Angeles defense technology company he started in 2022 that reached a $4.5 billion valuation in three years on the strength of its Coherent Distributed Networks - a synchronization-based platform that spots airborne threats like drones and missiles roughly ten minutes faster than legacy radar. A former finance and venture operator at Allen & Company, Valar Ventures and 8VC, and a co-founder of counter-drone pioneer Epirus, Tenet has raised over $1 billion for CHAOS and recruited his father, former CIA Director George J. Tenet, as executive chairman.
Geoffrey Chaiken
Geoffrey Chaiken is the co-founder and CEO of BlinkRx (Blink Health), a New York-based digital health company rebuilding how prescription drugs get priced, paid for, and delivered. The son and grandson of physicians, he gave up a career in medicine to attack what he calls the real bottleneck in healthcare - not discovering new cures, but getting existing ones into patients' hands at a fair price. With his younger brother Matthew, he has raised more than half a billion dollars to digitize both the patient front end and the pharmaceutical industry's back end, partnering with drug makers and tens of thousands of pharmacies to strip middlemen out of the medication supply chain.
John Melas-Kyriazi
John Melas-Kyriazi is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Metrics, a San Francisco financial data platform that automates reporting between venture investors and their portfolio companies. A Stanford-trained engineer who once tinkered with guitar pedals in his basement, he spent six years investing at Spark Capital before noticing that the venture industry ran its data on spreadsheets and email. He left to fix it, building a networked system where startups and investors collaborate on the same numbers. He is also an active angel investor in 40-plus companies.
Katon Luaces
Katon Luaces is the co-founder and CEO of PointOne, an AI time platform that passively captures, classifies, and validates billable hours for law firms. A former Google and Applied Intuition engineer and Columbia machine-learning teaching assistant, he started PointOne in 2023 with CTO Jeremy Ben-Meir to fix the most-hated chore in law: the six-minute billing increment. The Y Combinator Winter 2024 company raised a $16M Series A led by 8VC in March 2026, bringing total funding to roughly $20M, with firms reportedly capturing 6 to 11 percent more billable time per day.
Dylan Serota
Dylan Serota is the CEO and Co-Founder of Terminal, a global tech talent marketplace that connects elite remote engineers with high-growth companies. After building a 100-person engineering team in Mendoza, Argentina during his time at Eventbrite, he co-founded Terminal in 2017 at the Atomic venture studio alongside Joe Lonsdale (Palantir co-founder) and Jack Abraham. Terminal has raised over $27M in funding including a $17M Series B led by 8VC, serves 100+ clients including Hims&Hers, iCapital, and Grindr, and is on track for nearly $50M in gross revenue. Serota took over as CEO in 2024 and has become a prominent voice on AI's impact on engineering talent and the future of distributed work.
Ryan VanGorder
Ryan VanGorder is the CEO of Opto Investments, a private-markets platform for wealth managers co-founded by Joe Lonsdale and backed by 8VC. A former BlackRock managing director who spent his early career at Seattle hedge-fund-of-funds Quellos, he is also a veteran adventure racer who has competed in more than thirty multi-day expedition races and once survived heat stroke in the Utah desert at 126 degrees.
Michael Ding
Michael Ding is the founder and CEO of Bobyard, an AI platform that uses computer vision to automate construction takeoffs and estimates. A Stanford-trained engineer and award-winning mathematician who grew up in Cupertino, he earned his California general contractor license as a teenager before dropping out of Stanford to launch Bobyard in 2023. By teaching machines to read blueprints the way an experienced estimator would, he's helped hundreds of contractors cut takeoff time by 65% and add over $1M in annual revenue per estimator. In December 2025, Bobyard raised a $35 million Series A led by 8VC, cementing its position as the leading AI platform for construction preconstruction workflows.
Joe Lonsdale
Joe Lonsdale is a serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Palantir Technologies, Addepar, OpenGov, and 8VC — a firm managing over $6 billion in assets. A chess prodigy turned PayPal intern turned Peter Thiel protege, Lonsdale built his empire around the belief that the most important companies are the ones governments and defense establishments can't function without. Based in Austin, Texas, he hosts the American Optimist podcast, co-founded the University of Austin, and runs the Cicero Institute — all while backing defense tech titans like Anduril at a $30.5 billion valuation.