Blue Water Autonomy is a Boston-based defense-tech and shipbuilding company designing and mass-producing fully unmanned, long-range autonomous ships for the U.S. Navy. Founded in 2024 by veterans of the Navy, Amazon Robotics, and iRobot, the company pairs a full-stack autonomy suite with producible ship designs aimed at sailing thousands of miles for months at a time. It emerged from stealth in April 2025 and has raised $64M total, including a $50M Series A led by GV.
Zach Lloyd is the founder and CEO of Warp, the Rust-based terminal that grew up into an agentic development environment. A former Google principal engineer who led the Docs and Sheets teams, he looked at the one tool every programmer touches and noticed it had barely changed in 40 years. Warp's answer: a command line that reads natural language, runs AI agents, and as of 2025 codes by prompt. The company has raised roughly $73-75M from Sequoia, GV, Dylan Field and Elad Gil, and went from its first $1M of ARR in 300-plus days to adding $1M every few days.
Brendan Bulik-Sullivan is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures) backing biotech and therapeutics companies from the San Francisco office. He arrived at venture capital by a back door familiar to almost no one: a Ph.D. in statistical genetics, an authorship on the LD Score Regression method that reshaped how human geneticists read GWAS data, and a stint designing the deep-learning neoantigen models at Gritstone Oncology. He now sits on the boards of Comanche Biopharma, Santa Ana Bio, Ventus Therapeutics, and Areteia Therapeutics.
Frédérique Dame is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where she leads investments in consumer technology, life sciences, and AI. A French immigrant who moved to Silicon Valley at 24, she built her career as a product and engineering leader at Yahoo!, Photobucket, SmugMug, and Uber — where she helped scale the company from 80 employees to 7,000+ across 68 countries. At GV she co-leads the Women's Health investment team and has backed companies including Midi Health, Found, Allara, Oula Health, and TMRW. She serves on the board of Les Mills International and previously on Ubisoft's board, and was named to Rock Health's Top 50 in Digital Health.
Karim Faris is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he leads investments in enterprise software, AI, cybersecurity, data analytics, and frontier technology. A self-described 'grounded optimist,' he brings a rare combination of deep engineering roots - he published peer-reviewed neural network papers at Brown University and was a product manager for the Pentium processor at Intel - and decades of venture experience. He joined GV at its inception, and has backed companies including DocuSign, Duo Security (acquired by Cisco), Cohesity, FullStory, and SecurityScorecard, while serving on 25+ boards across his career.
Michael McBride is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he leads early-stage investments in enterprise technology, AI, and open-source-powered companies. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who spent three decades building high-growth startups before pivoting to venture capital, McBride brought operational credibility from five years as GitLab's CRO - where he oversaw a 100x+ revenue run-rate expansion before its 2021 IPO. He joined GV in December 2023 and quickly became one of its most active dealmakers, leading GV's $319 million Cribl Series E - the firm's second-largest investment ever.
Laurence 'Lo' Toney is the Founding Managing Partner of Plexo Capital, a San Francisco-based institutional VC firm he incubated at GV (Google Ventures) and spun out independently in 2018. Plexo's distinctive 'full stack' model invests across three layers - LP stakes in emerging diverse fund managers, direct investments in companies sourced through those networks, and equity stakes in the GP management entities themselves. After senior operating roles at Nike, eBay, and Zynga (where he ran Zynga Poker to $250M in annual bookings), Toney moved into VC via Comcast Ventures and GV before building Plexo Capital's $42.5M Fund I with backers including Alphabet, Intel Capital, and the Ford Foundation. Named to Forbes BLK 50: Money Masters 2026, he has championed diverse fund managers as alpha generators long before it became conventional wisdom.
Shaun Maguire is a partner at Sequoia Capital who bridges the worlds of theoretical physics and venture capital. With a PhD in quantum gravity from Caltech under John Preskill, he co-founded the cybersecurity company Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks for over $1 billion) while completing his doctorate. At Sequoia, he leads investments in deep tech, aerospace, defense, and AI, backing companies like SpaceX, xAI, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. Before Sequoia, he was a partner at Google Ventures, where he led investments in Stripe, IonQ, and Opendoor. His unique background combines rigorous theoretical physics research on multiboundary wormholes with a track record of building and backing billion-dollar companies at the frontier of technology.
Jessica Verrilli is co-founder and managing director of Adverb Ventures, a San Francisco-based early-stage VC firm she launched in 2023 with April Underwood. A former VP of Corporate Development & Strategy at Twitter (employee #34), she led roughly 30 acquisitions including Vine and Periscope before becoming a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures). She also co-founded #ANGELS, a women-led angel investing collective that placed women on over 100 startup cap tables and produced landmark research quantifying Silicon Valley's gender equity gap. She holds the coveted @jess handle on X with 318,000 followers.
Ken Norton is a veteran Silicon Valley product leader turned executive coach. After co-founding Grand Central Communications (acquired by Google as Google Voice), spending 14 years at Google and GV shaping products used by over three billion people, he pivoted to running Bring the Donuts - a coaching practice for CPOs, VPs of Product, and Founder/CEOs. His 2005 essay 'How to Hire a Product Manager' is still considered the canonical PM career bible two decades on.