khosla-ventures
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The Orange Box That Bet the Smartphone Was Optional
A $199 orange gadget promised to replace your apps with an AI that clicks the buttons for you. The launch went viral, the reviews went brutal, and rabbit is still shipping.
The Firm That Funds the Things That Probably Won't Work
Vinod Khosla left a top-tier partnership to write checks nobody else would. Two decades and one $50 million OpenAI bet later, the willingness to be wrong looks like a strategy.
Albert Gozzi
He started Aleph in a pandemic apartment because every finance tool he'd used either felt ancient or tried to pull him out of the spreadsheet. Then he heard no 75 times - and raised a Series B anyway.
Rohan Chopra
Rohan Chopra is the co-founder and CEO of Convey, a San Francisco enterprise AI company that lets non-technical operators build and manage autonomous 'digital teammates' to run repetitive business operations. An early DoorDash engineer who spent roughly eight years there building the logistics and dispatch systems behind its delivery network, Chopra started Convey in 2024 with childhood friends Diego Canales and Will Harvey. In June 2026 the company raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC participating, after its platform logged more than one million hours of automated work for customers including NBCUniversal, Samsara, TelevisaUnivision, Unity, Faire and ChargePoint.
Vishwas Prabhakara
Vishwas Prabhakara is the co-founder and CEO of Honey Homes, a membership service that gives homeowners a dedicated, salaried handyperson for recurring maintenance and repairs. A Carnegie Mellon and Harvard Business School graduate, he spent 15-plus years in Silicon Valley product and operations roles - including ESPN, Digg, Yelp Reservations, and a stint as COO of the fintech Digit - before starting Honey Homes in 2021 with his wife Avantika and two other co-founders. The company operates across the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Dallas-Fort Worth and beyond, and has raised more than $21 million from investors including Khosla Ventures, Pear VC and Era Ventures.
Dan Roth
Dan Roth is the co-founder and CEO of Scaled Cognition, a Mountain View AI company building reliable, hallucination-free models for enterprises. Its flagship Agentic Pretrained Transformer (APT) tops agentic benchmarks and powers customer-service agents that follow policy and take action where accuracy matters, such as banking, insurance, and telecom. In June 2026 the company raised a $100 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures at a roughly $750 million valuation. Roth is a repeat founder: he co-founded Semantic Machines, an early conversational-AI company acquired by Microsoft in 2018, where he then served as corporate vice president of conversational AI, and earlier built Voice Signal Technologies, acquired by Nuance.
Daragh Murphy
Daragh Murphy is the Irish-born co-founder and CEO of Imprint, a New York fintech that builds co-branded credit card and loyalty programs for consumer brands like Rakuten, Booking.com, Turkish Airlines and H-E-B. A former corporate lawyer and WeWork operator, he started Imprint in 2020 and grew it to unicorn status, reaching a $1.2 billion valuation in a $150 million Series D in December 2025.
Aleph
Aleph is an AI-native financial planning and analysis (FP&A) platform that lets finance teams keep working in the spreadsheets they already know while syncing live data from 150+ source systems. Founded in 2020 by Albert Gozzi and Santiago Perez De Rosso and part of Y Combinator's Summer 2021 batch, the New York company pairs a web-based data platform with Excel and Google Sheets add-ins and AI that automates data cleaning, variance analysis, and reporting. Backed by Khosla Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, Picus Capital, and Y Combinator, Aleph serves customers including Webflow, Turo, Notion, Zapier, Harvey, and Chess.com.
Hook
Hook is a New York-based music technology company behind an AI-powered social app that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs into short-form clips for social media. By combining a catalog of over 20 million licensed recordings with AI tools for genre-shifting, tempo changes and video editing, Hook aims to turn unauthorized fan remixing into a channel that keeps artists and rights holders in control - and paid. Founded by former JioSaavn COO Gaurav Sharma, the company launched on iOS in early 2026 and raised a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
Mazama Energy
Mazama Energy is a Frisco, Texas geothermal developer building Enhanced Geothermal Systems that tap superhot rock (SHR) - underground formations above 374 C - to deliver low-cost, round-the-clock, carbon-free electricity. Incubated by Khosla Ventures and backed by Gates Frontier, the company reached a world-record 629 F (331 C) bottomhole temperature at its Newberry Volcano pilot in Oregon and aims to produce power at under 5 cents per kWh, with 10x the power density, 75% less water, and 80% fewer wells than conventional geothermal.
Scaled Cognition
Scaled Cognition is a Mountain View AI company building what it calls the first Agentic Pretrained Transformer (APT), a model designed and trained specifically for taking reliable, policy-adherent actions rather than just predicting language. Founded by the team behind Semantic Machines (acquired by Microsoft in 2018), it targets enterprise customer-experience workflows where mistakes and hallucinations are unacceptable - financial services, healthcare, telecom, and insurance. In June 2026 the company raised a $100M Series A led by Khosla Ventures to expand its research team and accelerate enterprise deployments.
Traba
Traba is a technology-driven marketplace that matches light industrial businesses - warehouses, distribution centers, manufacturers and event venues - with vetted temporary workers who pick up shifts through a mobile app. Founded in 2021 by Mike Shebat and Akshay Buddiga, the company uses AI, geolocation and computer vision to fill shifts fast and cut the no-shows that plague traditional staffing agencies, reporting a 99% fill rate against a roughly 46% industry average. Backed by Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, Traba has raised about $45.6M and positions itself as infrastructure for the industrial supply chain, with staffing as the starting point.
WithCoverage
WithCoverage is a New York-based insurtech that replaces the traditional commission-based insurance broker with a flat-fee, AI-enabled risk management team. Its platform pairs licensed insurance experts, attorneys and claims specialists with an AI audit engine that scans policies and operations to find hidden exposures, run competitive carrier bidding, and cut premiums - routinely saving clients over $100,000 a year. Founded in 2023 by Opendoor co-founder JD Ross and Compound alumnus Max Brenner, the company has replaced brokers for 550+ fast-growing businesses including Gopuff, Bombas, Blank Street and Eight Sleep, and raised a $42M Series B in January 2026 co-led by Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures.
Gaurav Sharma
Gaurav Sharma is the founder and CEO of Hook, a New York-based AI music platform that lets fans legally remix and mash up licensed songs and share them to social feeds while artists and rights holders keep control and get paid. A Johns Hopkins and Peabody Conservatory-trained musician turned operator, he previously helped scale India's JioSaavn to hundreds of millions of listeners and built and sold two consumer-tech startups. In 2026 Hook closed a $10 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $16 million.
Broccoli AI
Broccoli AI builds an AI-native operating system for home service businesses - plumbers, HVAC companies, and electricians. Its AI voice agents answer phones 24/7, book jobs in real time, follow up on leads, and flag emergencies, integrating directly with CRMs like ServiceTitan. Founded in 2021 by AJ Jain and Aditya Ketkar and part of Y Combinator's W22 batch, the company has grown to serve 800+ contractors and raised a $25M Series A led by Khosla Ventures.
Kognitos
Kognitos is a Mountain View-based enterprise AI company that lets business users automate back-office operations by writing instructions in plain English. Its patented neurosymbolic platform, Koncierge, pairs the language understanding of large language models with a deterministic symbolic execution engine, aiming to run automations that are auditable and free of hallucinations. Founded in 2020 by former Nutanix CTO Binny Gill, the company pitches itself as a modern alternative to legacy RPA tools like UiPath and has raised roughly $85M across seed, Series A, and a $25M Series B.
Vista AI
Vista AI (formerly HeartVista) builds AI software that automates MRI exams so any technologist can capture consistent, high-quality scans without a specialist on site. Spun out of Stanford's Magnetic Resonance Systems Research Lab in 2012, its FDA-cleared cardiac MRI product turns a manual, expert-dependent procedure into a largely automated one, and the company is expanding into brain, prostate and spine imaging. Backed by Khosla Ventures and a roster of major U.S. health systems, Vista AI positions automation as a fix for the gap between soaring MRI demand and a shortage of skilled technologists.
Max Brenner
Max Brenner is co-founder and CEO of WithCoverage, an AI-enabled risk management and insurance platform based in New York that raised a $42M Series B in January 2026, led by Sequoia and Khosla Ventures. He was part of the founding team at Compound, the wealth management platform, where he helped scale to its first $1B in AUM before starting WithCoverage with Opendoor co-founder JD Ross to rebuild the commercial insurance broker from scratch.
Mike Shebat
Mike Shebat is the co-founder and CEO of Traba, a New York-based labor marketplace that supplies vetted on-demand workers to warehouses, distribution centers, and light industrial employers. He started the company in 2021 after seeing, from inside a McMaster-Carr shipping floor and later Uber Eats, how often temp workers simply don't show up. Traba has raised roughly $46 million from Founders Fund and Khosla Ventures, and Shebat, a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, runs it on a famously intense in-office schedule.
Sriram Vasantharajan
Sriram Vasantharajan is the President and CEO of Mazama Energy, a Khosla Ventures and Gates Frontier-backed startup drilling into Oregon's Newberry Volcano to prove that superhot rock geothermal can deliver round-the-clock, carbon-free power at fossil-fuel prices. A former ExxonMobil engineer and CEO of oilfield services firm Blade Energy Partners, he is now applying decades of drilling and well-stimulation know-how from the oil patch to the geothermal industry, chasing rock hot enough to make a volcano's flank into a power plant.
Foundry Robotics
Foundry Robotics is a San Francisco startup building 'The Everything Factory' - an AI-first, assembly-focused contract manufacturer that uses Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models to run flexible robotic assembly cells. Instead of retooling a line for every new product, Foundry aims to let general-purpose robots switch between building drones, robot dogs, battery packs and satellite components on demand. Founded in 2025 by ex-Ghost Robotics and Scale AI robotics lead Adarsh Kulkarni, the company positions itself as a dual-use manufacturer serving both commercial customers and the U.S. Department of Defense, backed by a seed round led by Khosla Ventures and Garuda Ventures.
Rejuvenation Technologies Inc.
Rejuvenation Technologies is a Stanford-spun biotech developing modified-mRNA therapeutics that temporarily switch on telomerase to lengthen telomeres and reverse cellular aging in specific tissues. Its lead programs target fibrotic and age-related diseases such as pulmonary fibrosis, chronic liver disease and bone-marrow failure, delivered by proprietary tissue-targeted lipid nanoparticles. Backed by Khosla Ventures and Y Combinator, the company holds 50+ patents and is advancing toward Phase I clinical readouts.
TerraBlaster
TerraBlaster is a California agtech startup building a rugged, tractor-mounted soil sensor that reads nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium, pH and other nutrients in real time using Laser-Induced Breakdown Spectroscopy (LIBS) - the same laser technique NASA uses on Mars rovers, licensed from St. Louis deep-tech firm Impossible Sensing. Led by CEO Jorge Heraud, who previously co-founded Blue River Technology (acquired by John Deere for $305M), the company aims to replace slow, sparse lab soil sampling with instant, plant-level nutrient maps so farmers can apply exactly the right amount of fertilizer - cutting waste, boosting yields, and protecting waterways.
Jorge Heraud
Jorge Heraud is a Peruvian-born engineer and serial agtech founder who co-founded Blue River Technology — sold to John Deere for $305 million in 2017 — and is now CEO of TerraBlaster, a Redwood City startup using NASA-pioneered laser spectroscopy to give farmers real-time soil nutrient data, aiming to cut fertilizer waste and transform how agriculture feeds the world.
Reflex Robotics
Reflex Robotics builds a wheeled, general-purpose humanoid that does real work on warehouse floors. Founded by MIT alumni with hardware chops from Tesla, Boston Dynamics, Anduril and Oculus, the company designs and ships affordable humanoids that start with a human-in-the-loop and learn their way to autonomy. Their robots are deployed in pilots with GXO and other Fortune 100 logistics operators, with a manufacturing footprint planned in Nuevo Leon, Mexico.
Vinci
Vinci (Vinci4D, Inc.) is a Palo Alto physics-AI startup building a foundation model that simulates how hardware will behave before it is manufactured. Its system runs full manufacturing-resolution physics - thermal, thermo-mechanical and warpage analysis for advanced semiconductor packaging and 2.5D/3D chips - up to 1,000x faster than traditional finite-element tools, without meshing and without training on customer data. Founded in 2023 by Dr. Hardik Kabaria and Dr. Sarah Osentoski, the company emerged from stealth in December 2025 with $46M in total funding and has been benchmarked by over half of the world's top 20 semiconductor companies.
Adam Margolin
Adam Margolin is a computational biologist turned biotech founder who co-founded Flashpoint Therapeutics, a clinical-stage company engineering spherical-nucleic-acid nanomedicines that aim to turn weak cancer therapies into curative ones. After a 20-year academic career that took him from Wharton and Wall Street to running the #3-ranked genetics department in the country at Mount Sinai, and a stint as a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures, he teamed with Northwestern nanotech pioneer Chad Mirkin to build Flashpoint. He led the company as founding CEO through a $10M seed round before handing the chief executive role to biotech veteran Barry Labinger in 2025. His mission is deeply personal: his mother died of cancer when he was three.
Ashish Kapoor
Ashish Kapoor is the co-founder and CEO of General Robotics (formerly Scaled Foundations), a Redmond, Washington startup building a unified intelligence layer for robots of every shape. After 17 years at Microsoft, where he led the Autonomous Systems and Robotics Research group, created the open-source AirSim simulator, and co-authored the widely read 'ChatGPT for Robotics' paper, Kapoor set out in 2023 to make robot intelligence portable across hardware. His thesis: general intelligence emerges from the rich composition of many robot skills, not from a single ever-larger model. He holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab, flies and has built his own airplane, and treats simulation as the laboratory where machines learn to be safe before they touch the real world.
Rhoda AI
Rhoda AI is a Palo Alto robotics company building foundation models that teach robots to act in the messy physical world by learning from internet-scale video instead of staged lab demos. Its FutureVision system - a Direct Video Action (DVA) model - watches an environment, predicts what happens next, and converts those predictions into motion in a closed loop that updates every few hundred milliseconds. Founded in 2024 and out of stealth in March 2026 with a $450M Series A at a $1.7B valuation, Rhoda targets high-variability manufacturing and logistics work.
Sergei Sorokin
Sergei Sorokin is the co-founder and CEO of Highlight, a San Francisco company building a shared intelligence layer for the agentic age of work. He spent roughly eight years at Discord as one of its earliest product hires and eventual VP of Product, helping scale the platform from a few million users to hundreds of millions and building its revenue business, including Nitro, from zero. After Discord he advised and built AI startups, then took the helm of Highlight in March 2026 alongside a $40M Series A led by Khosla Ventures. His thesis: in the workplace, AI is no longer bottlenecked by intelligence, but by coordination.