ai-investing
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Bob Hammer and the value of keeping things
He spent two decades building Commvault around a simple bet: businesses would keep making data, and someone would have to look after it. His next chapter takes that patience into AI investing and education.
Mark Machin and the price of admission
After two decades at Goldman Sachs and five years leading Canada’s pension investor, Mark Machin helped build Opto to widen access to private markets. His next chapter is a US$525 million fund backing companies built around AI.
Public grew up. So did its investors.
The app that made investing social is building a brokerage that can follow instructions. Its bigger bet: customers will bring their whole portfolio along.
Jannick Malling Is Still Redrawing the Trading Screen
He began with a Flash website at 13 and entered online finance at 17. Two decades later, Public's product-minded co-CEO is still trying to make markets feel less like a private language.
STV wants founders to keep more of what they build
The Riyadh investor built its name backing regional tech companies. Now, callable equity and a Google-backed AI fund are widening its answer to a stubborn question: how should a startup pay for growth?
Bruno Koba Is Building the Adviser He Wished He Had
A dinner by a BART station turned two Brazilians' investing frustrations into Astor. Now the former Nubank data scientist and Monashees investor is betting that useful financial advice can become a conversation, not a luxury.
Battery Ventures Plays Every Stage of the Technology Stack
The 43-year-old investor combines venture capital, growth equity and buyouts under one technology thesis. Its newest $3.25 billion fund is a test of whether stage flexibility matters more than category fashion.
The Small-Check Strategy Behind A.Capital’s Biggest Bets
A.Capital built its pitch around a Silicon Valley heresy: a venture firm does not need a fixed ownership target to matter. Its wager is that recruiting muscle, technical judgment and the right introduction can make a small slice unusually consequential.
The Venture Fund That Turned the YC Alumni Group Chat Into an AI Investing Machine
Orange Collective has made a narrow bet with a wide network: let more than 150 YC alumni help spot the AI founders worth backing. The result is part venture fund, part expert panel and part software-assisted research desk.
The Small-Portfolio Bet Behind Mendoza Ventures
The Boston firm is trying to prove that a venture fund can stay institutional, stay hands-on and still widen the door. Its method is unusually finite: three technical sectors, a 12-to-15-company portfolio and more contact than a quarterly board meeting.
The VC Firm Selling Founders Something Rarer Than Money: A Shortcut to the Right Room
Notable Capital inherited a 25-year investing record, then made a sharper promise: the check is only the opening move. Its real pitch is access - to hires, buyers, operators, and the hard-won pattern recognition that can move a young company faster.
The Fund Built to Turn UW Lab Coats Into Cap Tables
Ken Horenstein spent years watching University of Washington research spin out billion-dollar companies for investors somewhere else. Pack Ventures is his answer: a fund that shows up on day zero, before the pitch deck is polished.
The Firm That Turned $26 Million Into a Billion, One Concentrated Bet at a Time
It runs a small firm out of Santa Monica, writes a handful of checks a year, and once turned a $26.5 million CrowdStrike stake into a billion-dollar return. Here is how March Capital plays venture capital like a concentration bet.
Inspired Capital Wants the Napkin, Not the Hype Cycle
The New York firm has nearly $900 million, fewer than 10 new bets a year and a taste for founders still sketching the future. Its wager is that operating experience and patient conviction can beat venture capital by trend cycle.
The VC That Thinks Your Moonshot Has a Marketing Problem
Spacecadet writes $100K-$500K checks into frontier science, then hands founders a creative studio built to sell the impossible. Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon are along for the ride.
The Fund That Bets on 30 Companies and Backs Teenagers
While rivals raise billion-dollar megafunds, A* is doing the opposite: fewer bets, bigger conviction, and a willingness to wire money to founders who are not old enough to rent a car.
The Hedge Fund That Bet Twice on the Same Future
Leopold Aschenbrenner built an AI fund around one sweeping conviction. When both sides of the trade moved against him, leverage turned a brilliant thesis into a forced sale.
Exinity
Exinity grew out of online forex, then began placing the same market machinery inside an investing app, a prediction game and even Roblox. Its wager is that the next generation will learn finance in the digital spaces it already inhabits.
Jan Szilagyi
Jan Szilagyi is the CEO and co-founder of Reflexivity (formerly Toggle AI), a New York fintech building zero-hallucination AI for investment analysis. He ran a $15 billion global macro book at the world's top hedge funds - Duquesne, Fortress, Lombard Odier - before deciding the tooling he wished he'd had didn't exist, so he built it. He earned the fastest Harvard Economics PhD on record (2.5 years) under Ken Rogoff, and his first backer was his old boss Stanley Druckenmiller.
Alex Nichols
Alex Nichols is a General Partner at CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund. He invests in companies reinventing large markets through novel economic or distribution models, then compounding through scale - a thesis carved out across deals like Stripe, Duolingo, Whatnot, Rippling, UiPath, Waymo, Odoo and Zach Dell's Base Power. Promoted to GP in January 2026 alongside Jill Chase, the first time CapitalG named two GPs at once since the firm's 2013 founding.
Carle Stenmark
Carle Stenmark is a General Partner at VMG Partners in San Francisco, where he leads the firm's technology investing practice (VMG Tech). After spending his first years at VMG investing in branded consumer products, he convinced the firm's LPs to launch a dedicated tech strategy backing the software, marketplaces, and AI-native businesses that power the consumer ecosystem. He has partnered with founders at Afresh, Boulevard, FERMAT, Claim, Nowsta, and Daily Harvest.
Gordon Ritter
Gordon Ritter is Founder and General Partner of Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm he co-founded in 2003 that became one of the defining forces in enterprise SaaS investing. He backed Salesforce in its earliest days, co-founded a SaaS company with Marc Benioff, championed Veeva Systems when it had 25 employees and under $1M in revenue (now a $35B public company), and helped land Zoom's first institutional check. A four-time Forbes Midas List honoree, Ritter closed Emergence's seventh fund at $1 billion in March 2025, focused on AI-native enterprise software. Away from the portfolio, he has summited Denali, run 250 miles across the Swiss Alps, and serves on Princeton's Board of Trustees, where he shapes AI and education curricula.
James Detweiler
James Detweiler is a General Partner at Felicis, the venture firm behind investments in Shopify, Fitbit, and Twitch. Promoted to General Partner in February 2026, he has sourced, led, or co-led 25+ investments across AI, robotics, vertical software, and defense - including Skild AI (now valued at $14B), RunwayML, and Mercor. A summa cum laude Dartmouth grad in Physics and Mathematical Finance, he honed his AI investment lens at Zetta (the first AI-focused venture fund) and SVB Capital before joining Felicis. He founded the Felicis Fellows program to bridge top AI researchers and entrepreneurship, and coined the investment thesis 'The Great Splintering' - the idea that as thinking becomes cheap, value shifts to trust, judgment, and presence. He grew up in Santa Clara as the youngest of five children of an actress and a painter.
Medha Agarwal
Medha Agarwal is a General Partner at Defy VC, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Woodside, California, where she partners with founders from day zero through Series A. With roots at Redpoint Ventures (7 years as Partner), Bessemer Venture Partners, and two founder stints of her own, she brings a rare blend of operator instinct and institutional investing muscle to sectors including vertical SaaS, fintech, AI-first companies, healthcare technology, and marketplaces. A Harvard College and Harvard Business School alumna, Medha is also a prolific writer—her Medium essays on vertical SaaS and AI pricing have become required reading in startup circles—and was named one of Business Insider's 66 Rising Stars of Venture Capital in 2023.
Pantelis Kalogiros
Pantelis Kalogiros is a Greek-born technologist-turned-investor serving as General Partner at Cox Exponential (CX2), the early-stage AI investment vehicle of Cox Enterprises. He co-founded Fyusion in 2014, building its web infrastructure to handle 2.7 billion daily requests and embedding its 3D vision SDK into 200 million devices before the company was acquired by Cox Automotive in 2020. A self-taught dropout who obtained a U.S. green card without a bachelor's degree, Pantelis brings rare depth as both a hands-on engineer and active venture investor focused on applied AI.
Sarah Catanzaro
Sarah Catanzaro is General Partner at Amplify Partners, a Menlo Park-based venture firm investing in technical founders building data infrastructure, machine learning tools, and enterprise software. Before venture, she mapped Somali pirate networks and built threat intelligence systems for the US Secret Service. She joined Amplify in 2017, made partner in 2020, and became General Partner in 2022. Her portfolio includes RunwayML, LangChain, Modal Labs, Hex, DatologyAI, and WarpStream. She invests pre-product, bets on problem-obsessed founders, and argues that most AI struggles trace back to bad data.
Jennifer Li
Jennifer Li is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads infrastructure investments across data systems, developer tools, and AI. Born and raised in northwest China, she pivoted from international business to software engineering before joining a16z in 2018. Promoted to General Partner in April 2024 at age early 30s - making her the 27th GP at the firm - she now helps lead the $1.25B Infrastructure fund. Her portfolio includes early bets on ElevenLabs (backed Series A through D to $11B valuation), Fivetran, dbt, Mux, and MotherDuck.
Kirsten Green
Kirsten Green is the founder and managing partner of Forerunner Ventures, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with nearly $3 billion in AUM that made early bets on Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, Glossier, Bonobos, and Chime. A former equity research analyst who walked mall parking lots every Friday counting shopping bags, Green built Forerunner over a decade of SPV investments before raising her first institutional fund in 2012. Her consumer-first thesis - that following where people spend their time and money reveals where the economy is heading - has made her one of the most recognized venture investors in the world, appearing on the Forbes Midas List and Forbes World's 100 Most Powerful Women consecutively since 2017.
Ashton Kutcher
Ashton Kutcher is a venture capitalist, actor, and entrepreneur who transformed from sitcom star to one of Silicon Valley's most successful celebrity investors. As General Partner of Sound Ventures, he's built a $250M+ portfolio including Airbnb, Uber, Spotify, and Robinhood, with 35 exits and 7 unicorns. Beyond investing, he co-founded Thorn, a nonprofit using technology to combat child sexual exploitation, and has helped identify over 31,000 trafficking victims. From biochemical engineering student to Hollywood leading man to tech heavyweight, Kutcher represents a rare bridge between entertainment and venture capital.
Sundeep Peechu
Sundeep Peechu is a Managing Partner and founding member of Felicis Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most consistent early-stage VC firms. A former IIT Madras engineer who went through Intel before pivoting to venture capital, he has backed transformational companies including Plaid, Canva, Notion, Cruise, Runway, and Mercor. Known for a decade-plus holding philosophy, hands-on founder support, and a particular obsession with AI and health tech, he has helped guide Felicis from a $41M debut fund in 2010 to a $900M Fund X in 2025.