pear-vc
(12)
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.
Bobyard
Bobyard is a San Francisco AI company that automates construction takeoffs and estimates. Its proprietary computer-vision and NLP models read blueprints and automatically count symbols and measure areas and lengths, cutting bid-prep time by more than half. Founded in 2023 by Michael Ding, the company started with landscaping - one of construction's least-digitized trades - and has expanded into electrical, finishes, mechanical, and plumbing. It raised a $35M Series A led by 8VC in December 2025.
Armon Sharei
Armon Sharei is the founder and CEO of Portal Biotechnologies, a cell-engineering platform company in Watertown, Massachusetts that builds devices to push genetic and molecular cargo into living cells without killing them. He earned a chemical engineering PhD at MIT, where he invented the membrane-squeezing CellSqueeze technique, then founded SQZ Biotechnologies, raised more than $300M, struck a billion-dollar Roche partnership, and took the company public on the NYSE in 2020 before being ousted and watching it liquidate in 2024. After a sabbatical spent drawing comics about immune cells, he returned with Portal, choosing this time to sell tools rather than develop drugs, and has built a network of 100+ customers including most of the top 10 global pharma companies plus an $8M DARPA contract.
Omar Issa
Omar Issa is the co-founder and CEO of ResiQuant, a San Francisco startup that uses structural engineering AI to read a building's hidden vulnerabilities and rebuild how property insurers underwrite catastrophe risk. A second-generation structural engineer raised in the Bay Area, he earned a PhD at Stanford's John A. Blume Earthquake Engineering Center, specializing in machine learning for disaster recovery. After walking through the rubble of earthquakes from Ridgecrest to Turkey and the wreckage of Hurricane Ian, he and co-founder Francisco Galvis built ResiQuant to give underwriters the engineering-grade data they were missing, raising $4M in seed funding led by LDV Capital in 2025.
Samuel Adeyemo
Samuel Adeyemo is the co-founder and CEO of Duranta, a Seattle software company building AI tools that help landscapers and lawn care businesses measure properties, design projects, and win contracts. Born in Nairobi and trained in finance at JP Morgan before pivoting to climate tech, he previously co-founded Aurora Solar, the solar design platform that grew to a reported $2 billion valuation and powers a large share of the U.S. residential solar market. In 2025 he raised a $7 million seed round for Duranta, backed by Base10 Partners, Pear, and angels including GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. His through-line is taking the unglamorous back-office work of physical-world trades and turning it into software.
Scott Kazmierowicz
Scott Kazmierowicz is the co-founder and CEO of Cardless, a San Francisco fintech rebuilding the credit card from the brand outward. Started in March 2019 after a Christmas Eve napkin session in a Bryant Park Whole Foods, Cardless lets companies like Coinbase, Bilt, Qatar Airways and Alibaba launch and run their own co-branded credit programs without the legacy bank in the middle. A Stanford computer science grad who passed through Goldman Sachs and Allen & Company before turning founder, Kazmierowicz frames the work as a design problem as much as a finance one: make credit products that are useful, fair and respectful of a person's dignity. By 2025 the company had raised more than $170 million and was growing card transaction volume 400% year over year.
Arpan Shah
Arpan Shah is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where he leads early-stage investments in AI, fintech, and data infrastructure. A Stanford-trained engineer from Kolkata, he was on the founding team at Robinhood, later founded Flannel (acquired by Plaid in 2021), and was a partner at Pear VC and a Sequoia Scout before joining Spark in November 2024.
Katia Ameri
Katia Ameri is a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) focused on the intersection of consumer and technology. An LA native of Iranian descent and Stanford graduate, she was the first investment hire at Pear VC, then founded Mirra - a skincare company that grew to 200,000+ newsletter subscribers with zero ad spend - before joining a16z in 2021. At a16z she leads consumer investments, runs the Speedrun accelerator program, and is the founder of Tech Week by a16z, a decentralized conference series in SF, LA, and NYC that drew 40,000+ attendees and 1,000+ events in New York alone.
Michael Ding
Michael Ding is the founder and CEO of Bobyard, an AI platform that uses computer vision to automate construction takeoffs and estimates. A Stanford-trained engineer and award-winning mathematician who grew up in Cupertino, he earned his California general contractor license as a teenager before dropping out of Stanford to launch Bobyard in 2023. By teaching machines to read blueprints the way an experienced estimator would, he's helped hundreds of contractors cut takeoff time by 65% and add over $1M in annual revenue per estimator. In December 2025, Bobyard raised a $35 million Series A led by 8VC, cementing its position as the leading AI platform for construction preconstruction workflows.
Mar Hershenson
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Pejman Nozad
Pejman Nozad is the Founding Managing Partner of Pear VC, a $800M+ AUM seed-stage venture firm he co-founded in 2013. Born in Tehran, he arrived in Silicon Valley in 1992 with $700 and no English, worked as a car washer, lived in a yogurt shop attic, then became the top Persian rug salesman on University Avenue in Palo Alto — selling $8M in a single year to the Valley's most powerful VCs and founders. Those relationships became deal flow. He backed Dropbox, DoorDash ($1.9M seed → $440M), AppLovin, and Andy Rubin's pre-Android company Danger. Forbes ranked him #1 on its Midas Seed List three consecutive years (2023, 2024, 2025). He has no CS degree, no MBA, and never worked in tech — yet built one of the highest-performing seed funds ever and joined the board of Sheffield United FC in 2025.