growth-investing
(29)
The Venture Firm That Refused to Let CyberArk Stay Small
JVP's defining investment did not begin with a perfect pitch. It began with a security company that could sell at home, stumbled in America and needed an investor willing to change the story - then buy more.
Riot Ventures Built a $1 Billion Firm by Betting on the Physical World
While venture capital chased frictionless software, Riot went looking for friction - factories, fleets, power systems and defense hardware. Its concentrated, multistage strategy now stretches from the first institutional check to pre-IPO rounds.
Sound Ventures Put Hollywood's Playbook Into Venture Capital - Then Made a Concentrated Bet on AI
The Beverly Hills firm built its edge around product instinct, pop-culture reach and hands-on founder access. Its next chapter is narrower: Guy Oseary and Effie Epstein are doubling down on commercial scale, brand-building and a concentrated AI portfolio.
The Venture Firm Built on Steel - and Its Famous List of Mistakes
Bessemer Venture Partners has spent decades funding technological change while publicly cataloguing the giants it once declined to back. That combination - patient capital, partner autonomy and an unusual appetite for admitting error - explains how a steel-era family office became a $20 billion venture platform.
The Firm That Bets on Companies That Already Work
For 40 years, Summit Partners has looked for founders who already found something that works - then handed them capital and a playbook to make it bigger. The results include Uber, McAfee, Klaviyo, and $9.5 billion of fresh dry powder.
The Private Equity Firm That Wants to See Every Receipt
The Newcastle Network backs consumer brands with $25 million to $75 million checks, then asks for the data beneath the dashboard. Its wager is that private equity works better when capital, code and working operators share the same room.
IVP Waits for the Rocket to Clear the Tower - Then Adds Fuel
Most venture firms sell access to the future. IVP sells help with the messier moment after a product works, when a breakout company must turn momentum into an institution.
Greycroft Wants to Catch the Next Big Company Before It Has a Category
The 20-year-old venture firm built one platform for seed bets and growth checks. Now it is looking past neat labels to find companies that can turn a sharp first product into a much larger market.
The Firm That Publishes Its Homework
Cathie Wood built ARK Invest on a heresy in money management: tell everyone what you are buying, why, and when - then let them watch.
Abhishek Malani
Abhishek Malani is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's Growth team, based in New York. A Harvard Economics magna cum laude graduate (Class of 2022), he spent three years at Silver Lake Partners as a private equity associate before joining Sequoia in June 2025. He focuses on companies at inflection points - where market timing, product strength, and team ambition converge. His notable investments include Kalshi (federally regulated event trading, $22B valuation Series F) and Juicebox (AI recruiting platform, $30M Series A). He looks for founders who are deeply obsessed with their problem and willing to take bold action while staying open to course correction.
Everett Randle
Everett 'Ev' Randle is a General Partner at Benchmark, one of Silicon Valley's most legendary and selective venture capital firms. A Colorado native who graduated top of his class from CU Boulder's Leeds School of Business, Randle cut his teeth at Vista Equity Partners before moving through Bond Capital, Founders Fund, and two stints at Kleiner Perkins. He backed companies like Rippling, Anthropic, Databricks, Flock Safety, and Huntress across those roles. He is also a respected essayist in the VC world, best known for 'Playing Different Games' (2021), a widely-cited breakdown of Tiger Global's disruption of venture capital, and 'Operating Yield' (2023), a new framework for measuring SaaS growth efficiency. In April 2025, Benchmark announced Randle as its newest General Partner - a firm that manages roughly $425M per fund with only five partners.
Yasmin Razavi
Yasmin Razavi is a General Partner at Spark Capital, where she leads growth-stage investments in fintech, enterprise software, and AI infrastructure. Born in Tehran and educated at the University of Toronto (engineering) and Harvard Business School (MBA), she brings an operator's lens to venture - forged at McKinsey, Index Ventures, and Snap's monetization team. Since joining Spark in 2017, she has backed defining companies including Deel, Marqeta, Anthropic (leading its $450M Series C), and Qdrant, and now sits on Anthropic's Board of Directors.
Stacy D'Amico
Stacy D'Amico is an Operating Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads a16z Apex - the firm's CEO partnership platform connecting Fortune 1000 leaders with a16z's growth-stage portfolio - and the Growth Advisory Platform helping portfolio companies scale market impact. A Silicon Valley native with 10 years at Gartner under her belt, she brings a rare blend of enterprise go-to-market expertise and institutional venture know-how to the operators and founders she serves.
Stephenie Zhang
Stephenie Zhang is a partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), the storied Silicon Valley venture firm behind Airbnb, Coinbase, and GitHub. A Phi Beta Kappa computer science graduate from MIT who grew up in Palo Alto, she joined a16z from Warburg Pincus, where she honed her instincts on growth and late-stage technology deals. At a16z, she backs enterprise technology companies at the growth stage, with investments spanning workflow orchestration (Temporal), AI-native presentations (Gamma), and internal developer tools. She also co-authored a16z's 'Big Ideas 2026' thesis on the agentic interface - the idea that software design is shifting from visual, human-first hierarchies to machine-legible structures built for AI agents.
Alex Immerman
Alex Immerman is a General Partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads growth-stage investments across AI, consumer, fintech, crypto, and the physical world. Promoted to GP in January 2026 after seven years with the firm, he has spearheaded investments in category-defining companies including ElevenLabs, EliseAI, Flock Safety, Hebbia, Kalshi, Revolut, Sardine, Stripe, and Waymo. Before a16z, Immerman worked at General Atlantic as a growth-stage investor, served as Chief of Staff for the CFO of Facebook and CEO of Gainsight, and was an investment banker at Allen & Co. He graduated summa cum laude from Wharton and earned his MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School.
Cole Pergament
Cole Pergament is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, one of the most storied venture platforms in Silicon Valley. A Wharton summa cum laude graduate who founded his university's undergraduate fintech group, Cole cut his teeth at Morgan Stanley's Global Technology Group before spending four years at BOND Capital, where he backed companies that became household names in AI and enterprise software - including OpenAI, Decagon, AlphaSense, Weights & Biases, and Wiz. He joined Sequoia in July 2025, bringing a reputation for seeking founders who embrace discomfort, question convention, and are fully committed to their vision.
David Cahn
David Cahn is a Partner at Sequoia Capital and one of the most closely-watched voices in AI infrastructure investing. A former General Partner and COO of Venture at Coatue Management, he backed foundational AI companies including HuggingFace, Runway, and Supabase before joining Sequoia in 2023. Known for his sharp, data-driven essays — most notably 'AI's $600B Question' — Cahn argues that the durability of the AI wave depends not on clever applications but on who controls the physical stack: servers, steel, and power. A University of Pennsylvania graduate, NYC native, and self-described iterative thinker, he is backing the next generation of AI-native companies from Sequoia's Menlo Park headquarters.
Ethan Choi
Ethan Choi is a Partner at Khosla Ventures leading the firm's Growth Fund, where he writes checks between $15M and $70M into cloud infrastructure, SaaS, enterprise, and consumer internet companies from Seed through Series C. Before joining Khosla in 2024, he was a Partner at Accel, where he backed Klaviyo (now NYSE: KVYO), 1Password, and Pismo (acquired by Visa). His investing philosophy pivoted from metrics-first to founder-first — he now spends 90% of his diligence energy on the people rather than the numbers. A former LDS missionary who spent two years in South Korea, Choi is an unusually direct voice on AI's disruption of white-collar work and the coming robotics inflection point.
Isaiah Boone
Isaiah Boone is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team, focusing on enterprise applications, infrastructure, commerce, and marketplaces. A Pomona College math and statistics graduate, he cut his teeth at RBC Wealth Management and Leonard Green & Partners before joining Sequoia in December 2020. His portfolio includes category-defining companies like Ramp, Rippling, Mercury, Meter, Faire, and Island - businesses reshaping how companies manage money, people, and infrastructure.
Giovanni Ahern
Giovanni Ahern is an Investing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms, where he focuses on growth-stage investments. A dual-degree MIT graduate in Mathematics and Computer Science with Economics, Ahern built his investment acumen through roles at Blackstone, Houlihan Lokey, and three years as a Private Equity Associate at Bain Capital specializing in healthcare and technology. Joining a16z in September 2025, he brings a quantitative rigor and cross-sector perspective to backing the next generation of market-defining technology companies.
Justin Kahl
Justin Kahl is an Investing Partner on the Growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on growth-stage software, enterprise AI, fintech, and consumer technology. A Stanford-trained engineer and economist who played varsity soccer, he cut his teeth investing in later-stage software and consumer internet deals at Bain Capital before joining a16z in 2021. At a16z, he has become a leading voice on enterprise platform dynamics, Gen AI adoption, and how software companies navigate down markets—co-authoring widely-cited research with colleagues Sarah Wang, David George, and Alex Immerman on topics ranging from the anatomy of enterprise platform companies to how 100 CIOs are deploying AI in 2025.
Raghu Raghuram
Raghu Raghuram is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on AI infrastructure and growth-stage investments. Born Rangarajan Raghuram, he spent nearly two decades at VMware - joining when it was a five-year-old startup and leaving as its CEO after guiding the company through the largest software acquisition in history: Broadcom's $69 billion deal. Before VMware, Ben Horowitz hired him at Netscape during the browser wars. That 30-year relationship brought him back together at a16z in October 2025, where he now helps lead the firm's AI infrastructure charge while serving as a consigliere to Horowitz himself.
Peter Blackwood
Peter Blackwood is a Partner on the Capital Network team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Consumer vertical and manages the firm's global investor, corporate strategic, and advisory relationships for consumer and gaming companies. A former investment banker with over 15 years in the technology sector - spanning SoundView Technology Group, Janney Montgomery Scott, and JMP Securities - Blackwood brings deep capital markets expertise to a16z portfolio companies navigating equity raises, debt financing, and strategic partnerships. He is co-author of a16z's widely-read '16 Commandments of Raising Equity in a Challenging Market' and joined the board of gaming platform Overwolf following a16z's $75M Series D investment. Off-hours, he chases trout on rivers.
Santiago Rodriguez Lebrija
Santiago Rodriguez Lebrija is a Deal Partner on the Growth investing team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he focuses on fintech, consumer, and crypto technology companies. A Stanford chemical engineering graduate originally from Mexico City, he cut his teeth as an Investment Analyst at Stanford Management Company and a Business Analyst at PEMEX before joining Bain Capital's global private equity division. Since joining a16z in August 2022, he has co-led investments in companies like Kavak - Latin America's leading used-car marketplace reimagined around AI - and hyperexponential, a London-based insurtech modernizing how insurers price risk. He brings an unusual combination of deep operational instinct and cross-cultural fluency to growth-stage bets, with a particular eye for operationally complex businesses being rebuilt around AI.
Sarah Wang
Sarah Wang is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where she leads growth-stage investments across AI, enterprise applications, and infrastructure. A Harvard and Stanford GSB alumna with rare dual-mode investor instincts - equally comfortable asking 'Is it working?' and 'What if it works?' - she has backed defining companies of the AI era including Cursor, Wiz, Character.ai, Gamma, Decagon, and Thinking Machines Lab, while working closely with a16z's positions in OpenAI, Databricks, SpaceX, SSI, and Figma.
Shangda Xu
Shangda Xu is an Investing Partner on the Growth team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms. Focused on enterprise technology companies - from AI infrastructure to enterprise SaaS - he brings a dual lens: the analytical rigor of a Harvard summa cum laude economist-mathematician and the operator pattern-recognition of someone who has worked across private equity (Warburg Pincus), investment banking (PJT Partners), and corporate strategy (Disney, Warner Bros.). At a16z, he co-authors influential research on enterprise AI adoption, including how Fortune 500 CIOs are actually deploying generative AI - making him one of the more data-grounded voices in an arena full of hype.
David George
David George is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the firm's Growth investing practice - a $15 billion operation he built from scratch after joining in 2019. A former General Atlantic investor who backed Airbnb, Slack, CrowdStrike, and Uber at growth stage, George brings a ruthlessly analytical, 'business model snob' approach to late-stage venture. He has since backed Roblox, Databricks, SpaceX, Stripe, Figma, OpenAI, and Anduril, developing distinctive frameworks around 'what vs. how' innovations, push vs. pull market dynamics, and winner-take-all market structures. A Kentucky native with a wrestling background, a Notre Dame summa cum laude degree, and an MBA from Stanford GSB, George is known for his competitive intensity, deep intellectual frameworks, and a Post-it note on his computer that reads: 'Is the market demanding more of my product?'
Pat Grady
Pat Grady is co-steward of Sequoia Capital, one of Silicon Valley's most legendary venture capital firms. Since joining Sequoia in 2007 at age 24 as the youngest hire in the firm's history, he has led growth-stage investments in generational companies including OpenAI, ServiceNow, Snowflake, and Zoom - a portfolio exceeding $250 billion in combined market capitalization. A Wyoming native who worked as a roofer to pay for college, Grady now shapes the future of technology as co-leader of Sequoia alongside Alfred Lin, focusing heavily on AI and enterprise software innovation.
Andrew Reed
Andrew Reed is a Partner on Sequoia Capital's growth team - possibly the youngest junior partner in Sequoia's history when he joined at 23 from Goldman Sachs in 2014. Over a decade, he's built one of the most impressive growth-stage portfolios in venture capital, with board seats at Figma, Klarna, Bolt, Vanta, Strava, Warp, and Harmonic, and investments in Robinhood, ElevenLabs, Zapier, Phantom, and Sourcegraph. A childhood stutter made him a listener first, which turned into his greatest edge in founder assessment.