battery-ventures
(11)
Anthony Olivier and the business of being understood
He built MadCap Software around the people who explain how things work. Two decades later, Anthony Olivier is asking what happens when AI can produce more information than a company can keep in order.
Evan Witte and the distance between an introduction and a customer
From co-founding software companies to building enterprise relationships at Battery Ventures, Evan Witte has worked on both sides of the sales conversation. His current question is what a network actually produces.
Kurt Schrader
Kurt Schrader is the co-founder and CEO of Shortcut, the New York project management platform for software teams that started life as Clubhouse in 2014. After years of building and scaling engineering organizations, including a stint as CTO of Intent Media where he grew the team from one person to more than 40, he set out to build tooling that stays simple for daily users while giving leaders real visibility. In 2025 he steered Shortcut into the AI era with Korey, an AI product manager that turns plain-language ideas into build-ready plans.
Sarim Khan
Sarim Khan is co-founder and CEO of Triomics, a New York-based startup building oncology-specific AI agents that read the thousands of pages inside a cancer patient's chart so that clinicians don't have to. A chemical engineer trained at IIT Roorkee with a brief stint researching polymer gels in brain tissue at MIT, he started Triomics in 2021 with college friend Hrituraj Singh, went through Y Combinator's W21 batch, and by mid-2026 had raised $22 million in Series B financing led by Battery Ventures and deployed the platform at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Yale Cancer Center, and four of the top ten U.S. News cancer hospitals.
Vik Kashyap
Vik Kashyap is the founder and CEO of Toi Labs, the San Francisco company behind TrueLoo, an AI-enabled toilet seat that quietly turns ordinary bathrooms in senior living communities into a source of passive wellness data. A Harvard graduate and former Battery Ventures associate, he previously built Canopy, a consumer healthcare SaaS company acquired by Aetna and later CVS. TrueLoo was named a 2024 TIME Best Invention and is deployed across dozens of senior communities. He holds about 10 patents and has been cited or quoted in The Wall Street Journal, CNN, The New York Times, and Science Translational Medicine.
Ali Akhtar
Ali Akhtar is the co-founder and CEO of Letter AI, a Chicago-based, AI-native revenue enablement platform that helps B2B sales teams build training, content, coaching, and live deal guidance with generative AI. A University of Chicago and Michigan Ross graduate, he spent roughly a decade leading machine learning and product teams at Samsara, project44, and McKinsey before launching Letter AI through Y Combinator's Summer 2023 batch. By early 2026 the company had raised more than $52 million, including a $40 million Series B led by Battery Ventures, and counted Lenovo, Adobe, Novo Nordisk, Plaid, and SolarWinds among its customers.
Ross Mechanic
Ross Mechanic is the co-founder and CEO of Maybern, a New York fintech building the financial operating system for private funds. A software engineer by training, he watched fund accounting teams duplicate the same capital-call and waterfall math across roughly 100 spreadsheets at Cadre, and built Maybern to automate it. The company supports more than $80 billion in assets across 150+ fund vehicles and raised a $50 million Series B led by Battery Ventures in late 2025.
Chelsea Stoner
Chelsea Stoner is a General Partner at Battery Ventures who hunts down vertically focused software companies and healthcare-IT operators across North America. She joined Battery in 2006 and has helped scale Avalara, Glassdoor, Guidewire, Marketo, RealPage and WebPT, among others. Recognized on Forbes Midas Hot Prospects and GrowthCap's Top 25 Healthcare Investors.
Dharmesh Thakker
Dharmesh Thakker is a General Partner at Battery Ventures, one of the world's longest-running technology venture capital firms, where he leads investments in infrastructure software, AI-powered applications, cloud/DevOps, data, security, and open source. An immigrant from India turned engineer turned VC, he joined Battery in 2015 after leading Intel Capital's global cloud and big-data practice. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from UT Austin and an MBA from Wharton. His portfolio spans category-defining companies including Databricks, Postman, Gong, ClickHouse, and Weaviate, with notable exits including Confluent (IPO), JFrog (IPO), and Sumo Logic (IPO). He hosts the 'Billion-Dollar B2B' podcast, writes for TechCrunch and Forbes, and was named to the Forbes Midas Brink list in 2016.
Kelly Kinnard
Kelly Kinnard is Operating Partner and Head of Talent at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms. She leads the talent function across 500+ portfolio companies, advising founders and CEOs on how to recruit and retain exceptional leaders. With a career that spans elite retained search firms, Oracle's cloud transformation, and Battery Ventures before landing at Khosla, Kelly has helped shape the executive teams driving some of tech's most ambitious bets. She is known for treating recruiting like relationship-building - equal parts strategy, empathy, and persistence.
Nakul Mandan
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.