playground-global
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Austin Oehlerking
Austin Oehlerking is the co-founder and CEO of Boxbot, an Alameda, California robotics company reinventing how parcels are stored, sorted, and sequenced inside the supply chain. A mechanical engineer trained at MIT with a Harvard MBA, he cut his teeth building electric vehicles at Arcimoto and Tesla before starting Boxbot in 2016 as a self-driving last-mile delivery venture. When customers proved more excited about the box-handling robot than the delivery van, Oehlerking pivoted the company toward AI-driven, high-density parcel storage, turning the flat conveyor belt into a three-dimensional machine. Boxbot has raised roughly $28-29.5M from Playground Global, Toyota Ventures, Maersk Growth, Pear Ventures, and Artiman Ventures.
Timothy Craven
Timothy Craven is the co-founder and CEO of Insamo, a Berkeley-based biotech using machine learning, ultra high-throughput biology, and parallel chemistry to design membrane-permeable, orally available macrocyclic peptides with antibody-like binding. A computational chemist trained in the Nobel-winning lab of David Baker, Craven started Insamo from a grad-school concept with $20,000 of his own money and grew it into a Berkeley-Sydney team backed by a $12M seed from Playground Global, venBio, and Merck's MRL Ventures Fund. His pitch is blunt: turn $30,000 injectable biologics into pills.
Laurie Yoler
Laurie Yoler is a General Partner at Playground Global, a Palo Alto-based deep-tech venture capital firm backing companies working on fundamental technologies - robotics, AI, quantum computing, biotech, and beyond. A founding board member of Tesla and early backer of Zoox (acquired by Amazon for $1.3B), she has spent three decades at the intersection of engineering, strategy, and capital allocation. Before venture, she helped launch Visa's debit card division, built Sun Microsystems' server platform dominance, and ran Qualcomm Labs as President. She holds a summa cum laude degree from Washington State University and audits courses at Stanford across engineering, law, and neuroscience.
Peter Barrett
Peter Barrett is the Founder and General Partner of Playground Global, a Palo Alto-based deep tech venture firm managing over $1.2 billion across three funds. An Australian-born engineer turned investor, Barrett holds 100+ patents, gave Elon Musk one of his first jobs in the 1990s, and built the world's most popular IPTV platform at Microsoft before pivoting to backing founders working on problems that sit 'somewhere between improbable and impossible.' Playground Global's portfolio spans quantum computing, robotics, synthetic biology, and energy transition — representing Barrett's conviction that the computing and industrial revolutions are still ahead of us.
Jacob Borrajo
Jacob Borrajo is the Founder and CEO of Amber Bio, a Cambridge-based biotech company pioneering a first-of-its-kind RNA writing platform capable of multi-kilobase edits. With a PhD in Biological Engineering from MIT and research training at the Broad Institute, Borrajo has spent his career building at the intersection of CRISPR, machine learning, and synthetic biology. Amber Bio launched in August 2023 with a $26 million seed round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Playground Global, with strategic participation from Eli Lilly and the Retinal Degeneration Fund. His platform's key innovation: treating diseases with high allelic diversity using a single therapeutic product, by editing RNA rather than DNA - making gene therapy safer, reversible, and dramatically more scalable.