early-stage-investment
(10)
Evan Stites-Clayton
Evan Stites-Clayton is a General Partner and CTO at HF0, a San Francisco-based residency and venture fund that backs repeat technical founders building AI-native startups. He previously co-founded Teespring with Walker Williams at Brown University in 2011, scaling it from a $3,000 weekend experiment to over $1 billion in cumulative sales and $65 million raised from Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures before going through Y Combinator's W13 batch. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30, he joined HF0 in 2022 to help the next generation of builders compress the gap between idea and scale.
Eric Rosenblum
Eric Rosenblum is a General Partner at Xora Innovation, a Temasek-backed early-stage venture firm investing in AI infrastructure, applied AI, and deep tech. Based in Silicon Valley, he is the firm's first US-based GP, bridging Southeast Asian capital with American innovation. Before Xora, he built Foothill Ventures into a leading deep-tech seed fund and spent his career as an operator at Google, Palantir, and as founder/executive at two acquired startups. A Harvard and MIT Sloan graduate raised in Steubenville, Ohio, he brings a rare combination of big-tech product leadership, China market experience, and hands-on startup scaling to his role as investor.
Jesse Robbins
Jesse Robbins is General Partner at Heavybit, the San Francisco-based venture firm focused exclusively on developer-first companies. He co-founded Chef (sold to Progress Software for $200M+), invented GameDay chaos engineering at Amazon where he held the title 'Master of Disaster', and co-created the O'Reilly Velocity Conference that seeded the global DevOps movement. A former volunteer firefighter and EMT, he brings a crisis-responder's instincts to early-stage investing, backing companies like Snyk, PagerDuty, Fastly, LaunchDarkly, and Tailscale. His portfolio spans 60+ companies with five IPOs.
Julien Nguyen
Julien Nguyen is a French-educated General Partner at IT-Farm Corporation, a Tokyo-and-Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm with ~$100M under management across seven funds. A serial entrepreneur who founded four startups before pivoting to venture capital, he holds 21 US patents and was an early investor in Zoom (Series A), Wish, and Treasure Data. Based in Menlo Park, California, he bridges the US and Japanese technology ecosystems, helping global startups expand into Japan and Asia while backing transformative technologies in digital health, IoT, robotics, and AI.
Matt Logan
Matt Logan is General Partner at Earthshot Ventures, a $60M San Francisco-based climate tech fund he helped build from the ground up. Formerly with Elemental Excelerator and Advanced Microgrid Solutions, Logan brings a rare blend of project finance, corporate partnerships, and data-driven sourcing to early-stage climate investing. He built Earthshot's proprietary outbound sourcing engine and focuses on companies where powerful technology waves - AI, robotics, materials, and energy - intersect with outsized climate benefit.
Maxine Minter
Maxine Minter is Australia's first solo female General Partner at a venture capital fund, and the Founder & GP of Co Ventures - a $5M pre-seed fund dedicated to backing software-led companies with at least one Australian founder building for global scale. Based in San Francisco, she started her career as a tech lawyer, pivoted into startup founding and operating, and began angel investing with $2,500 cheques before raising her own fund. She co-hosts the 'First Cheque' podcast with Cheryl Mack, champions a 'belief capital' philosophy, and has built a portfolio with over 50% women founders.
Mike Carusi
Mike Carusi is a General Partner at Lightstone Ventures, a leading life sciences venture capital firm based in Portola Valley, California, with $847 million in assets under management. With a career spanning over three decades in healthcare investing, Carusi has built a reputation as one of the most active early-stage investors in biotech and medical devices, appearing on the Forbes Midas List for top technology and life science investors. He co-founded Lightstone Ventures in 2014 after years at Advanced Technology Ventures (ATV), and has overseen landmark exits including Plexxikon (acquired by Daiichi Sankyo for ~$1 billion), Ardian (acquired by Medtronic for $800 million), Ra Medical Systems (acquired by UCB for $2.3 billion), and dozens more. He teaches healthcare venture capital at Dartmouth Tuck and is a faculty member of the Stanford Biodesign Emerging Entrepreneurs Forum.
Teppei Tsutsui
Teppei Tsutsui is General Partner and co-founder of GFR Fund, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on gaming, generative AI, creator economy, and consumer tech. Tokyo-raised and University of Chicago-educated, he co-founded GFR Fund in 2016 after a decade spanning Mitsubishi Corporation, Morgan Stanley M&A, and GREE - where he moved to San Francisco in 2014 to launch their seed investment program. GFR Fund III closed at $53.5M in 2023, and the firm's portfolio of over 100 companies includes three unicorns - VRChat, Animoca Brands, and Sky Mavis - with GFR's earliest and most famous bet being VRChat, invested when the platform had just 1,000 active users.
Tom Davis
Tom Davis is a General Partner at Canapi Ventures, a fintech-focused venture capital firm with over $1.29B in total funding. Based in San Francisco, he leads the firm's West Coast operations and sits on its investment committee, focusing on early- to growth-stage investments in financial technology and B2B software. With nearly two decades spanning Morgan Stanley investment banking, General Atlantic, and Centana Growth Partners, Davis brings rare fluency across the capital stack - from traditional banking relationships to cutting-edge fintech infrastructure. He joined Canapi in November 2023 to open their first San Francisco office, signaling the firm's push deeper into Silicon Valley's fintech ecosystem.
Yoav Samet
Yoav Samet is a General Partner at Almaz Capital, a Palo Alto-based venture firm backing disruptive deep tech and B2B software companies with a unique focus on Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. Before joining Almaz, he spent 13 years at Cisco as VP of Corporate Development, where he led roughly 20 acquisitions totaling over $7 billion and managed a $1 billion investment portfolio. An Israeli native and veteran of IDF Unit 8200, Samet holds an MBA from Stanford GSB and MS/BS degrees in Computer Science from Hebrew University, and has built a career as a rare bridge between Silicon Valley, Israel, and the CEE/CIS technology ecosystem.