emergence-capital
(11)
Alison Wagonfeld
Before taking on NVIDIA's story, Alison Wagonfeld spent three decades learning how technology businesses are built - from a mortgage website and Harvard case studies to venture capital and Google Cloud.
Saoud Rizwan
Saoud Rizwan is the founder and CEO of Cline, an open-source AI coding agent that runs inside code editors like VS Code. He built the first version in June 2024, about ten days after Anthropic released Claude 3.5 Sonnet, as a side project for the company's Build with Claude hackathon. He didn't win, but the project caught fire online and Cline has since passed millions of installs and raised $32M in seed and Series A funding from Emergence Capital and Pace Capital. Before Cline, Rizwan was a prolific iOS and Swift open-source developer. His pitch is unusually blunt for the AI era: Cline captures zero margin on AI usage, shows developers exactly what each request costs, and lets them bring their own models.
Matt Calvano
Matt Calvano is co-founder and CEO of Adaptive, a New York-based AI-native accounting and financial management platform built for the construction industry. A former real estate private equity investor and Morgan Stanley banker turned Stanford MBA, he launched Adaptive in 2022 with two Stanford classmates and has raised $26.4M from Emergence Capital and Andreessen Horowitz to attack the paperwork chaos and cash leakage inside the $2 trillion construction sector.
Arnold Engel
Arnold Engel is the co-founder and CEO of Tundra, a zero-commission wholesale marketplace he started in 2017 with his wife Katie Engel after years running a global supply chain company. A Dartmouth economics graduate and former McKinsey consultant, Engel built Tundra to hand independent retailers the same buying power as big-box giants - no transaction fees, no markups, free shipping. The platform grew to more than two million ready-to-ship products and over 30,000 retailers, raising about $42 million across rounds including a $26M Series B led by Emergence Capital in 2021.
Dakotah Rice
Dakotah Rice is the co-founder and CEO of Harper, an AI-native commercial insurance brokerage based in San Francisco and part of Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch. After a Wall Street run through Goldman Sachs, The Carlyle Group, and Coatue Management, Rice built and wound down the fintech startup Poolit before returning to the insurance industry his family worked in. In February 2026 Harper announced a combined seed and Series A of roughly $47M led by Emergence Capital, reported as the largest publicly disclosed Series A ever raised by a Black founder. Harper matches small- and mid-sized businesses with 160+ carriers and serves thousands of customers across dozens of states.
Michael Manapat
Michael Manapat is the co-founder and CEO of Rowspace, an AI platform that turns a finance firm's proprietary data into compounding decision-making edge. He built the machine learning behind Stripe Radar, the fraud engine that scans every card payment across the Stripe network, then spent three and a half years as CTO of Notion driving its push into AI. A mathematics PhD from MIT and former Google engineer, he launched Rowspace in February 2026 with $50M backed by Sequoia and Emergence Capital, already serving roughly ten top private equity and credit firms managing hundreds of billions in assets.
Carlotta Siniscalco
Carlotta 'Lotti' Siniscalco is a General Partner at Emergence Capital in San Francisco, the first woman partner in the firm's two-decade history. She backs early-stage enterprise software and fintech founders, with board roles at Federato, Whistic, and High Alpha. Milanese by birth, Wharton and Stanford by training, she sent cold emails to every AIFI member as a teenager to break into venture and hasn't slowed since.
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.
Kevin Spain
Kevin Spain is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, one of Silicon Valley's leading early-stage enterprise technology venture firms. A native Texan who cut his teeth founding atMadison.com after winning the inaugural Wharton Business Plan Competition, Spain brings an operator's instincts to his investing — shaped by stints at Electronic Arts (where he helped launch the online gaming division) and Microsoft's Corporate Development group. At Emergence, he has led landmark investments including Doximity (NYSE: DOCS, ~$10B market cap), Blend (NYSE: BLND), and Augmedix (NASDAQ: AUGX), and sits on the Doximity board. More recently he has focused on physical robotics, AI-native services, and healthcare GenAI, with positions in Physical Intelligence and Bedrock Robotics.
Jake Saper
Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, the San Francisco-based venture firm that backed Zoom, Salesforce, and Veeva before the rest of the world caught on. Over a decade at Emergence, he has become one of the loudest and most credible voices on AI-native services — companies that combine human expertise with AI to displace the $200B consulting industry. His 2024 essay 'The Death of Deloitte' earned him a cease-and-desist from Deloitte and a loyal readership of founders rebuilding professional services from scratch. A Yale and Stanford-trained operator-turned-investor, he grew up in Austin watching serial-entrepreneur parents build companies, started his own career selling rocks door-to-door from a Radio Flyer wagon, and today holds board seats at category-defining enterprise companies while maintaining a side career as a self-described 'mediocre guitar player.'
Josephine Chen
Josephine Chen is a Partner at Sequoia Capital focused on seed and Series A investments at the intersection of enterprise software, fintech, and crypto. Born in Massachusetts and raised largely in Taiwan before moving to the Bay Area at age ten, she brings a biomedical informatics background from Stanford and a career arc through Genentech, McKinsey, and Emergence Capital. She champions immigrant founders, bets on biology-meets-software breakthroughs, and has backed companies including Found, AMP Robotics, Anrok, Cresta, Abby Care, and Magic Eden.