Tagged: lightspeed
28 results
Flow Specialty
Flow Specialty is a Mountain View insurtech that set out to automate the grind of specialty wholesale insurance placement with AI. Founded in 2021 as Capitola and rebranded to Flow in April 2024, the company built what it called the industry's first AI insurance broker: a system of backend AI agents - branded 'Platformless AI' - that read submissions, match risk to carrier appetite, build quotes and support human brokers end-to-end without asking retail agents to log into anything. In 2024 its AI reportedly became the first system to pass an RPLU underwriting certification exam, and the firm claimed a 50% quote-to-bind ratio, roughly double the industry norm. In June 2026, ReSource Pro acquired Flow's technology, IP and core team, appointing founder Sivan Iram to lead a new 'AI Factory.'
Mstack
Mstack is an AI-native chemical R&D and manufacturing company that helps enterprises source and produce custom specialty chemicals. It pairs a cross-border network of vetted suppliers across India, the Middle East and Asia with Chemstack AI, a closed-loop platform that designs and ranks synthetic routes to compress molecule development from roughly 18 months to days. Founded in 2022 by former Lightspeed investor Shreyans Chopra, the company serves 100+ enterprise customers and is backed by Lightspeed and Alpha Wave Global.
Michael DeSimone
Michael DeSimone is the Chief Executive Officer of NewStore, the Boston-based unified commerce platform for global retail brands. He took the role in April 2024 after a career leading commerce-technology companies through IPOs, acquisitions, and scale-ups, including Borderfree (IPO on NASDAQ, sold to Pitney Bowes), ShopKeep (acquired by Lightspeed for a reported $750 million), and SmartRecruiters, where he was CEO.
Sarim Khan
Sarim Khan is co-founder and CEO of Triomics, a New York-based startup building oncology-specific AI agents that read the thousands of pages inside a cancer patient's chart so that clinicians don't have to. A chemical engineer trained at IIT Roorkee with a brief stint researching polymer gels in brain tissue at MIT, he started Triomics in 2021 with college friend Hrituraj Singh, went through Y Combinator's W21 batch, and by mid-2026 had raised $22 million in Series B financing led by Battery Ventures and deployed the platform at Memorial Sloan Kettering, Yale Cancer Center, and four of the top ten U.S. News cancer hospitals.
Inferact
Inferact is a Berkeley- and San Francisco-based AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM, the most widely used open-source engine for running large language models. The company commercializes vLLM - which at any moment powers inference on more than 400,000 GPUs worldwide - by funneling paid engineering resources back into the open project while building a next-generation commercial 'universal inference layer' meant to make AI inference cheaper and faster. Inferact launched publicly in January 2026 with a $150 million seed round at an $800 million valuation, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed.
Sandstone
Sandstone is an AI-native operating system for in-house legal teams. It unifies a company's legal data, workflows, and business context into a single system that lives inside the tools teams already use - Slack, email, Salesforce, Jira - and deploys AI agents to handle intake, triage, drafting, and redlining. Founded in 2025 by ex-McKinsey and practicing-lawyer trio Nick Fleisher, Jarryd Strydom, and Liam Germain, the New York company launched publicly in January 2026 with a $10M Sequoia-led seed and followed with a $30M Series A led by Lightspeed five months later.
Macroscope
Macroscope is a San Francisco AI startup that turns sprawling codebases into legible, reviewable work. Founded in 2023 by Periscope alums Kayvon Beykpour and Joe Bernstein with Magic Pony co-founder Rob Bishop, it sits between engineers and managers - reviewing pull requests, catching bugs, and summarizing what an engineering org actually shipped, without anyone having to attend another status meeting.
Rohan Kodialam
Rohan Kodialam is the co-founder and CEO of Sphinx, a New York applied-AI research firm building agents that actually understand data. A former Citadel quant who learned to squeeze alpha out of messy alternative datasets, and an MIT-trained researcher who once taught transformers to read hierarchical data, he started Sphinx on a simple observation: software engineers got Copilot, everyone else got ChatGPT, and data scientists got nothing. In 2025 Sphinx launched out of stealth with a $9.5M seed led by Lightspeed and backers including Steve Cohen and Naveen Rao, betting that the next frontier of AI is not language or code, but the spreadsheets and warehouses where real decisions get made.
Jon Wang
Jon Wang is the co-founder and co-CEO of Assort Health, a San Francisco company building voice AI agents that answer the phone for doctors' offices. A Stanford bioinformatics graduate and Gates-Cambridge Scholar who walked away from UCSF medical school, Wang spent two years studying why patients wait on hold before launching Assort with Jeff Liu in 2023. The company has since handled more than 42 million patient interactions and raised $102 million, including a $76 million Series B led by Lightspeed in 2025.
Albert Malikov
Albert Malikov is the founder and CEO of Stacks, a London-based startup building agentic AI for enterprise accounting and the month-end financial close. A former Head of International Product at Plaid and a product lead on Uber's Money team, he raised a $23M Series A led by Lightspeed in February 2026, less than a year after emerging from stealth, with customers including Epidemic Sound, Pleo and Bloom & Wild closing their books 50-60% faster.
Bipul Sinha
Bipul Sinha is the CEO, Chairman, and Co-Founder of Rubrik, the publicly traded data security company he built from a Bihar basement story into a $17B+ NYSE-listed cybersecurity platform. Before founding Rubrik in 2014, he spent nearly a decade as a venture capitalist at Lightspeed Venture Partners — backing companies like Nutanix and Hootsuite — and nine years at Oracle holding 30+ patents in distributed computing. An IIT Kharagpur and Wharton alumnus who grew up in poverty in Darbhanga, Bihar, Sinha turned a contrarian bet on backup-and-recovery software into the gold standard for enterprise data resilience in the ransomware era.
Aayush Ghosh Choudhury
Aayush Ghosh Choudhury is the Co-Founder and CEO of Scrut Automation, a SaaS-based GRC platform that automates compliance and risk management for mid-market and enterprise companies. A former McKinsey consultant and IIT Ropar / ISB graduate, he co-built Scrut after experiencing firsthand how compliance bottlenecks stall enterprise sales - discovering the solution while trying to sell a different product entirely. Under his leadership, Scrut has grown to 800+ customers globally, raised $20.5M from Lightspeed, MassMutual Ventures, and Endiya Partners, earned a LinkedIn Top 20 Startup 2024 ranking, and been recognized by G2 as a fastest-growing and highest-satisfaction product in security compliance.
Bill Liu
Bill Liu is the Co-Founder and COO of Seel, the San Francisco-based company that invented Return Assurance — AI-powered insurance that lets shoppers add a refund window to final-sale purchases at checkout. Liu co-founded the company (originally called Kover.ai) in 2019 with CEO Zack Peng after completing the Techstars MetLife Digital Accelerator. He oversees team-building and go-to-market strategy for a platform now trusted by 5,000+ merchants, protecting 24 million+ orders and serving 2 million+ monthly shoppers. Seel has raised $29M+ in total funding including a Series B in May 2025 and was named to CB Insights' AI100 list of the world's most promising AI startups in 2023.
Chaithanya Yambari
Chaithanya Yambari is the Co-Founder and CTO of Zluri, a next-generation Identity Governance and Administration (IGA) platform that helps enterprise IT teams discover, manage, secure, and automate their SaaS applications. An engineer from BITS Pilani, he spent nearly a decade rising from software developer to Director of Engineering at gamification startup KNOLSKAPE before co-founding Zluri in 2020 alongside Ritish Reddy and Sethu Meenakshisundaram. Under his technical leadership, Zluri has raised $32M in total funding - including a $20M Series B led by Lightspeed Venture Partners in July 2023 - and now serves 270+ employees and hundreds of enterprise customers worldwide.
Zack Peng
Zack Peng is the founder and CEO of Seel, a San Francisco-based AI-powered return insurance platform that serves 2,000+ ecommerce merchants. A former software engineer at Orbital Insight with a philosophy and physics background from UNC Chapel Hill, Peng built Seel into an 8-figure platform in five years by turning ecommerce returns - historically a pure cost center - into a risk-priced insurance product. Backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners with over $29M raised through Series B, Seel enables merchants to offer extended return windows on final-sale and non-returnable items while using AI underwriting to manage refund liability at checkout.
Arsham Memarzadeh
Arsham Memarzadeh is a General Partner at Meritech Capital in Palo Alto, where he leads enterprise software and infrastructure growth investments. He arrived in early 2025 after six years at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where he helped lead the growth practice and backed Wiz, Chainguard, Verkada, ClickUp, Axonius, Personio, Enable, Payhawk, and Spiff.
Pika
Pika is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building a consumer video platform that turns text, images, and clips into short cinematic videos. Founded in 2023 by Stanford AI Lab alumni Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, Pika has shipped a string of fast-iterating model releases (Pika 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) and viral features like Pikaffects, Scene Ingredients, and Pikaframes. The company has raised roughly $135M from Spark Capital, Lightspeed, Greycroft, and others.
Sherwin Xia
Sherwin Xia is the co-founder and CEO of Trendsi, a San Francisco-based e-commerce supply chain infrastructure company that raised $30M total including a $25M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Before Trendsi, he was one of the first employees at Lime and an analyst at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). A Stanford postgraduate, Xia co-founded Trendsi in late 2020 after spotting an opportunity to bring Asian S2B2C supply chain models to Western markets, targeting a demographic of small boutique sellers and stay-at-home moms building online fashion businesses. Trendsi's platform automates inventory forecasting, dropshipping, and custom branding for thousands of independent sellers.
Arjun Prakash
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.
Bingrui Yang
Bingrui Yang is the Founder and CEO of Pebble, a Fremont-based startup building the Pebble Flow - an all-electric, semi-autonomous travel trailer that raised $13.6M in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. A veteran hardware engineer with roughly nine years at Apple leading iPhone development, followed by stints at Zoox (Director of Advanced Hardware Engineering) and Cruise (Head of AV Hardware Systems), Yang founded Pebble in 2022 after a pandemic-era RV trip convinced him the category needed a complete reinvention. His mission: make RVing as intuitive as using an iPhone. The Pebble Flow - a 25-foot, 45 kWh battery-powered trailer with Magic Hitch autonomous attachment, NVIDIA DRIVE Orin-powered automation, and Scandinavian-minimal interiors - earned a spot on TIME Magazine's Best Inventions of 2024 list and began delivering to its first customers in early 2025.
Adrian Radu
Adrian Radu is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, focused on early-stage investing from New York. Born in the UK to Romanian immigrant parents - his father worked in the satellite industry - he built his career from investment banking at Qatalyst Partners in London (advising on landmark European tech M&A) to helping establish Lightspeed Venture Partners' European presence and later opening their New York office. His portfolio spans frontier companies including Stripe, Anduril, Wiz, ClickUp, Flex, and Lightyear. A self-described top 0.1% Daft Punk listener and lifelong Chelsea FC supporter, he plays 100+ padel games a year and channels an obsession with technology that began watching his father work in satellites.
Demi Guo
Demi Guo is the co-founder and CEO of Pika, an AI-powered video generation platform that has raised $135 million and reached a $470 million valuation. A Harvard math-and-CS graduate and Stanford PhD dropout, she holds silver medals from the International Olympiad in Informatics and gold medals from the Math Prize for Girls. Before founding Pika in April 2023, she was the youngest full-time researcher at Meta AI. Her platform, which lets anyone create cinematic videos from a text prompt, reached 16.4 million users and inspired Pika 2.2 features that went viral with an 800% user surge.
Nicole Quinn
Nicole Quinn is a Managing Partner at Connect Ventures and former General Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, where she spent a decade building one of Silicon Valley's most distinctive consumer investing portfolios. A former British 100-meter sprinter who traded the track for Wall Street, Quinn worked on the Facebook and Groupon IPOs at Morgan Stanley before pivoting to venture capital. Known as the 'Celebrity Whisperer,' she's backed Lady Gaga's Haus Labs, Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, and companies like Calm, Cameo, and Rothy's. With a mathematics degree from York University and an MBA from Stanford, Quinn combines analytical rigor with an athlete's competitive drive and a certified coach's empathy for founders navigating the long game of company building.
Arif Janmohamed
Arif Janmohamed is a Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners with over 16 years backing enterprise AI, cloud infrastructure, and SaaS companies. A University of Waterloo computer engineering graduate and Wharton MBA, he has been the first institutional check behind companies like Netskope (Nasdaq: NTSK, IPO 2025) and Navan, and was on the Moveworks board from Day 1 through its $2.85B acquisition by ServiceNow in 2025. A Canadian with Ismaili-East African roots, fluent in French, and a self-taught ice hockey player, Arif blends deep technical fluency with a founder-first philosophy - often describing himself as part coach, part psychologist to the entrepreneurs he backs. As of early 2026, he is stepping back from day-to-day Lightspeed duties to launch a new early-stage investment firm.
Ravi Mhatre
Ravi Mhatre is a Partner and Co-Founder of Lightspeed Venture Partners, one of the world's premier venture capital firms. Over 25 years, he has built Lightspeed's enterprise practice into a powerhouse, backing transformative companies like Anthropic, AppDynamics, MuleSoft, Nutanix, Rubrik, ThoughtSpot, and Zscaler. A five-time Forbes Midas List honoree (2017, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2025), Mhatre led Lightspeed's $1 billion investment in Anthropic's $3.5B Series E and helped raise over $9 billion across six funds in 2025. The son of an Indian immigrant and a Brooklyn-born mother who lived on three continents before turning 18, Mhatre holds three degrees from Stanford and has dedicated his career to partnering with founders innovating in enterprise IT, AI, blockchain, and cloud technologies.
Nakul Mandan
Nakul Mandan is the founder and managing partner of Audacious Ventures, a $250M pre-seed and seed-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco. A graduate of IIT Kanpur and IIM Lucknow, he arrived in the US in 2009 on an H-1B visa and spent a decade investing at Battery Ventures and Lightspeed before launching Audacious in April 2020 — during COVID lockdowns. His firm's unconventional edge: embedding a full recruiting operation inside a VC fund, with technical recruiters actively running executive and engineering searches for portfolio companies. He has backed companies including WorkOS, Tome, FalconX, and Multiverse, and is known for his framework of five founder traits: high IQ, outsized ambition, the ability to make people believe, grit, and velocity.
Semil Shah
Semil Shah is the Founding General Partner of Haystack, a seed-stage venture capital firm he started from scratch in 2013 with $1M and zero management fees. Through seven funds totaling over $200M, he has backed companies including DoorDash, HashiCorp, Figma, and Instacart at seed stage. He also serves as Venture Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Named to the Forbes Midas Seed List four consecutive years (2022-2025), he built his career the hard way — through writing, blogging, and relentless deal-flow generation after being repeatedly turned down by top VC firms.
Amber Yang
Amber Yang is an Enterprise Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners backing highly technical founders building next-generation AI software and infrastructure. Before VC, she founded Seer Tracking - an AI startup that used neural networks to predict space debris orbits with 98% accuracy - winning the $50K Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award and landing on Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science at age 18. A Stanford CS/Physics grad with a philosophy detour at Oxford, she brings a rare trifecta of deep technical chops, founder experience, and investor instinct to the table.