Terra AI is a Palo Alto geoscience company building generative AI that turns the messy, expensive guesswork of subsurface exploration into fast, probabilistic 3D models of what lies underground. By fusing geophysics, geochemistry, and drilling data, its platform generates millions of geological scenarios in minutes, helping mining and energy teams decide where to drill, how many wells they need, and whether a project is worth the capital - shrinking exploration timelines and pointing capital at the critical minerals the clean-energy transition depends on.
Ali Albazaz is the founder and CEO of Inkitt, a San Francisco-based AI-powered publishing platform that uses reader engagement data and algorithms to identify and publish bestselling fiction. Born in Baghdad and raised in Germany, he bootstrapped Inkitt from a Berlin startup after 140 investor rejections into a $400M+ valued company with 33 million users across three platforms: Inkitt (writer community), Galatea (immersive reading app), and CandyJar (video entertainment). Inkitt has raised $116.8M in total funding, including a $37M Series C led by Khosla Ventures in February 2024.
Sadi Khan is the Co-Founder and CEO of Aven, a San Francisco-based fintech unicorn valued at $2.2 billion that created the world's first home equity-backed credit card. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate, Khan spent over a decade at Facebook leading product for Internet.org, Maps, Search, and Ads before co-founding Aven in 2019. Aven has since issued over $3 billion in credit lines, saved consumers more than $215 million in interest, and raised $252 million in total funding. Known for his maximally rational decision-making style and habit of wearing the same outfit every day to reduce cognitive load, Khan aims to build America's first 'machine banking' platform and democratize access to home equity for millions of homeowners.
Exaforce is a San Jose cybersecurity company building an Agentic AI SOC platform. Its multi-model AI engine and a crew of agents called Exabots handle detection, triage, investigation, and response so security teams stop drowning in alerts and start finding the real breaches.
Factory builds agent-native software development for enterprises. Its Droids - specialized AI agents for coding, reliability, product, and knowledge work - take tickets, write code, open PRs, and triage incidents alongside human engineers. Founded in 2023 by Matan Grinberg and Eno Reyes, the San Francisco company raised a $150M Series C in April 2026 at a $1.5B valuation led by Khosla Ventures.
Point One Navigation builds the precision-location stack behind autonomous vehicles, drones, robots and survey-grade tools. Its Polaris RTK network, Atlas inertial sensors and FusionEngine software fuse GNSS, inertial data and computer vision to deliver centimeter-level positioning across the US, Europe, UK, Australia, New Zealand and South Korea.
Arjun Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Distyl AI, a San Francisco-based enterprise AI company valued at $1.8 billion after raising $175M in a September 2025 Series B led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures. Drawing on nearly a decade at Palantir Technologies where he built and led a 30+ person team of Forward Deployed strategists and engineers, Prakash co-founded Distyl to help Fortune 500 companies become genuinely AI-native - not by layering AI onto existing processes, but by rearchitecting how enterprises operate. Distyl claims a 100% production success rate against an industry norm of 95% failure, serves clients across healthcare, manufacturing, telecom, and financial services, and reached profitability in Q3 2024.
Charles Cadieu is a serial entrepreneur and computational neuroscientist-turned-climate-tech founder. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of Spiritus, a direct air capture company aiming to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 per ton - down from the current $600-$1,000 industry standard. Before Spiritus, Cadieu founded Caption Health (AI-guided cardiac ultrasound, acquired by GE HealthCare in 2023) and IQ Engines (AI image recognition, acquired by Yahoo!/Flickr in 2013). Holding a PhD from UC Berkeley and degrees from MIT, he bridges deep academic roots in neural networks with a track record of building and exiting companies that redefine their industries.
John Dean is the Cofounder and CEO of WindBorne Systems, a Redwood City, California-based company operating the world's largest constellation of autonomous long-duration weather balloons. A Stanford electrical engineering graduate and former intern at SpaceX, NASA, and Lyft, Dean co-founded WindBorne in 2019 out of Stanford's Student Space Initiative after breaking four world records as undergraduates. The company raised a $15 million Series A led by Khosla Ventures in 2024, and its WeatherMesh AI model surpassed Google DeepMind's GraphCast as the most accurate global weather forecasting model, running on a fraction of the compute power. WindBorne's balloons have flown into Hurricane Milton and have set a new benchmark for how atmospheric data is collected at scale.
Matan Grinberg is the CEO and Co-Founder of Factory, an AI platform that deploys autonomous agents called Droids to automate the entire software development lifecycle. A theoretical physicist who dropped out of his UC Berkeley PhD program in 2023 after a fateful three-hour walk with Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, Grinberg built Factory from a 72-hour hackathon demo into a $1.5B unicorn backed by Khosla Ventures, Sequoia, Blackstone, and Insight Partners. Named to Forbes 30 Under 30 AI in 2025, he is one of the defining voices in the agent-native development movement.
Nessan Bermingham, Ph.D., is a serial biotech entrepreneur and Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures who has co-founded eight biotechnology companies including Intellia Therapeutics - one of the first public CRISPR gene editing companies - which he built from concept to IPO in under two years. A child of an Irish Army officer raised on a military base in Co. Kildare, he traded academia for Wall Street, Wall Street for venture capital, and venture capital for founding the companies reshaping genetic medicine. Today he shepherds a portfolio of cutting-edge biotech companies at Khosla Ventures while pursuing 155-mile ultra-marathons and aspiring to race at Dakar.
Ryan Batra is the VP, Talent Partner at Khosla Ventures, one of Silicon Valley's most influential deep-tech venture firms. A career talent architect with over a decade in hypergrowth tech, he spent six years building DoorDash's technical and executive recruiting machine through multiple phases of explosive expansion, then led recruiting at Lime and OpenStore before landing at Khosla. Now he helps founders across KV's portfolio - spanning AI, biotech, space, and climate - hire the engineers, researchers, and leaders who make bold ideas real. He's placed 500+ engineers and leaders. His philosophy: talent is one of the most powerful forms of leverage a founder has.
Ryan Scott is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he helps portfolio companies build durable, compounding growth. He made his name as Etsy's first-ever CMO and Head of International - scaling GMV from $3B to $14B, tripling active users, and expanding the brand to 220 countries while earning AdAge Brand of the Year in 2020. Before Etsy, he drove Grubhub Seamless from $100M to $6B in GMV and through its IPO. A Forbes Entrepreneurial CMO 50 honoree with seats on Google's Retail Advisory Council and Meta's Leadership Council, Scott brings two decades of consumer marketing, e-commerce, and business leadership to the deepest end of deep tech.
John Mern is the Co-Founder and CEO of Terra AI, a Khosla Ventures-backed startup using generative AI and probabilistic modeling to transform how humans find and develop critical minerals and energy resources underground. A Stanford PhD in aerospace engineering and alumnus of Boeing Phantom Works and KoBold Metals, Mern built Terra AI's platform to cut mine development timelines in half - running geophysical simulations 125,000x faster than traditional methods, achieving 40% reductions in drilling costs, and helping partners unlock over $100 million in investments. His work sits at the intersection of deep reinforcement learning, geoscience, and the urgent global race to secure the copper, lithium, and cobalt the energy transition demands.
Keith Rabois is a PayPal Mafia veteran, co-founder of Opendoor, and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures whose career spans law clerk, corporate attorney, political adviser, and now one of Silicon Valley's most prolific — and outspoken — investors. He is the first institutional backer of DoorDash, Affirm, and Faire, made early bets on Stripe, YouTube, and Airbnb, and brought the iBuyer model to residential real estate before moving to Miami and catalyzing one of the biggest tech migration waves in recent memory.