Tagged: seed
30 results
Long Wall
Long Wall is a Long Beach, California defense manufacturer building cost-effective, mass-producible missile defense systems. Founded in 2017 as the rocket startup ABL Space Systems, it rebranded to Long Wall in February 2025 and pivoted from commercial satellite launch to defense, repurposing years of launch-vehicle engineering into interceptors, target rockets, and deployable ground infrastructure. Its lineup includes Cyclops, a surface-launched exoatmospheric interceptor; RSX, a low-cost liquid booster for flight testing and threat replication; and Ironwood, rapidly deployable ground support equipment. The company's thesis is that modern threats - hypersonic weapons, growing nuclear arsenals, and raid sizes in the hundreds - have outrun the price and production volume of legacy interceptors, so defense needs magazine depth measured in thousands, not dozens.
Mandolin
Mandolin is a San Francisco healthcare AI company building agents that handle the paperwork blocking patients from specialty drugs. Its software automates intake, benefits verification, prior authorization, and claims work for infusion providers, specialty pharmacies, and health systems - the back office that decides how quickly a cancer or Alzheimer's patient actually gets treated.
Alex Hartz
Alex Hartz is a General Partner at Shine Capital, a New York seed-stage venture firm with about $435M across three funds. He came up at SciFi VC over eight years, trained as an applied physicist at Caltech, and writes checks into ambitious founders working at the intersection of hard sciences, financial infrastructure, and applied AI.
Amrit Rao
Amrit Rao is a General Partner at Village Global, the early-stage venture firm backed by Reid Hoffman, Jeff Bezos and a network of luminary LPs. A Stanford-trained biologist turned Wall Street investor turned advanced-manufacturing founder, he writes pre-seed and seed checks across tech and consumer, drawing on a dozen years of public-market investing and the bruises he collected building a furniture startup.
Antonio Key
Antonio Key is Co-Founder and General Partner of Sunset Ventures, a pre-seed fund based in Los Angeles and San Francisco that has backed more than 70 early-stage companies, including Ready Player Me, Yuga Labs, Wonder Dynamics, BlocPower, and Flow Carbon. Before Sunset, he was Director of Investments at Samsung Next and an M&A banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch who worked on roughly $26B in deals. He's a Kauffman Fellow (Class 28), Wharton MBA, and Stanford grad.
Arielle Zuckerberg
Arielle 'AZ' Zuckerberg is a General Partner at Long Journey Ventures, a San Francisco seed firm that backs the 'magically weird' - founders pursuing unconventional ideas at the earliest stages. A former product manager turned investor with stops at Wildfire Interactive, Google, Humin, Kleiner Perkins, and Coatue, she pairs a product-first lens with a hands-on, founder-friend approach. In March 2025 the firm announced a $181.8M fund (the number nods to chai - 18, life).
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.
Ashish Aggarwal
Ashish Aggarwal is a General Partner at Chamaeleon, a San Francisco-based early-stage venture firm. He invests in seed and Series A consumer, vertical SaaS, AI, and crypto startups, drawing on 18+ years as an operator, two-time founder, and investor. A Kauffman Fellow (Class 24), he previously led investments at Grishin Robotics in companies like Ziva Dynamics (acquired by Unity), Taskade, ClubFeast, and Spin (acquired by Ford). Before VC, he ran M&A and corporate strategy at Opera Software, marketing analytics at Dell, and built ad infrastructure at Yahoo!.
Ashu Garg
Ashu Garg is a General Partner at Foundation Capital in Palo Alto, where he writes the first check into deeply technical, pre-revenue founders building AI-first enterprise companies. He was an early investor in Databricks and six unicorns including Cohesity, Eightfold, Amperity, Turing, Anyscale, and Alation. He hosts the B2BaCEO podcast and convenes Foundation's annual CEO Summit.
Aymerik Renard
Aymerik Renard is a General Partner at HCVC (formerly Hardware Club), a community-driven venture firm investing in hardtech startups out of San Francisco and Paris. With more than two decades in venture capital - including stints at Innovacom, Orange, PCH International, SanDisk and Western Digital Capital - he backs founders working on robotics, space, biotech, defense and climate technology in Europe and North America.
Bill Evans
Bill Evans is the founder and general partner of Rock Health Capital, a San Francisco fund backing pre-seed through Series A entrepreneurs at the intersection of healthcare and technology. A former Goldman Sachs analyst turned 1990s software engineer turned biotech operator, he led Rock Health as CEO and managing director before spinning out the venture vehicle in 2022.
Brittany Walker
Brittany Walker is a General Partner at CRV in San Francisco who writes first checks to technical founders in AI, infrastructure software, and frontier technology. She joined CRV in 2020, was promoted to General Partner in 2024, and co-founded The Table, a community for women building in enterprise.
Carl Fritjofsson
Carl Fritjofsson is a General Partner at Creandum based in San Francisco, where he focuses on AI infrastructure, vertical AI, and consumer bets. A Swede who co-founded the rewards startup Wrapp and the bootstrapped ad network AdProfit before turning investor, he built Creandum's Silicon Valley office and has backed companies including Cornershop (sold to Uber for $3.5B), Pipe, GoPuff, Cast AI, Planhat, SafetyWing, and H Company.
ChenLi Wang
ChenLi Wang is a General Partner at WndrCo, the Redwood City venture firm that builds and backs early-stage technology companies. He was Dropbox's second business hire and built its growth, monetization, analytics and international teams before later running the core Dropbox app. At WndrCo he led investments in CompanyCam, Exa, Material Security, Meter, Socket, Defakto and Webflow, and has served operationally as Chief Product Officer at Aura and Pango.
Davis Treybig
Davis Treybig is General Partner at Innovation Endeavors, a deep tech venture firm in Palo Alto co-founded by Eric Schmidt. After graduating valedictorian from Duke's engineering school and spending three years as a Product Manager at Google working on Chrome, Google Assistant, and Pixel, he joined Innovation Endeavors and rose from Associate to General Partner in six years. His investment focus spans software and computing infrastructure, AI/ML tools, developer tooling, cybersecurity, and data systems. A prolific writer on Substack and Medium, he is known for research-driven due diligence - spending months in a space before writing a check - and for being the first call many founders make when sparring a new idea.
Daniel Karp
Daniel Karp is General Partner at Cervin Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage VC firm with $162M in its latest fund. A veteran of Cisco's corporate venture arm - where his portfolio generated over $2.5B in exits including Habana Labs (acquired by Intel for $2B) and GuardiCore - Karp brings a rare combination of chip engineering roots, Microsoft Azure product strategy, Israeli IDF intelligence experience, and nearly a decade of corporate M&A deal-making to his current focus on enterprise infrastructure, DevOps, cybersecurity, and AI-native startups.
Eric Ye
Eric Ye is a General Partner at Eastlink Capital, a Menlo Park-based early-stage VC firm backing AI and data infrastructure founders. A seasoned technologist turned investor, Eric spent over a decade at eBay as Director of Tech Platform and Principal Architect before serving as CTO, SVP of Technology, and Chief Scientist at Ctrip (NASDAQ: TCOM), the world's second-largest online travel agency, where he led 4,000+ engineers and architected the company's transformation into a cloud-native, mobile-first marketplace. Holder of 31 U.S. and China patents, winner of China's Best CTO Award, and a founding partner of Eminence Ventures, Eric now backs mission-driven founders at the seed-to-Series-B stage across AI/ML, distributed databases, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and enterprise software.
Hannah Chelkowski
Hannah Chelkowski is Co-Founder and General Partner at Blank Ventures, a $65M specialist fund investing at the intersection of fintech and commerce. A native Londoner now based in San Francisco, she brings an unusual backstory to venture - energy risk modeling at Total S.A. led to startup investing at Initialized Capital and Inovia Capital before she launched her own firm in 2022. Named to Business Insider's 71 Rising-Star VCs in 2022, she runs a deliberately concentrated portfolio with an LP base architected as a go-to-market asset: C-suite executives from major financial institutions, billion-dollar startups, and global family offices who become direct distribution channels for her portfolio companies.
Jake Storm
Jake Storm is a General Partner at Felicis, the early-stage venture firm behind companies like Shopify, Fitbit, and Canva. He focuses on AI, DevTools, cybersecurity, and deeptech — investing from pre-seed through Series B — and brought to Felicis a track record from IVP where he backed Lyra Health, Whoop, and CircleCI. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Venture Capital (2023), Storm grew up across multiple U.S. regions and Brazil, giving him a cross-cultural perspective he credits as foundational to how he evaluates founders and markets.
Jon Auerbach
Jon Auerbach is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of the oldest and most storied venture capital firms in the US. A former Pulitzer Prize-nominated technology journalist who covered conflict zones for The Boston Globe and The Wall Street Journal, Auerbach pivoted into venture capital in 2000, co-founding M-Qube (acquired by VeriSign for $275M) before joining CRV in 2004. Over two decades at CRV, he has backed transformative companies including Zendesk, DoorDash, and Affirmed Networks (acquired by Microsoft for $1.35B), earned a spot on the Forbes Midas List (ranked #16 in 2020), and now leads the firm's founder support operations spanning legal, finance, marketing, and talent.
Matt Lee
Matt Lee is the Founder and General Partner of Progression Fund, a pre-seed and seed-stage consumer technology VC firm co-founded with alumni from musical.ly and TikTok. Based in Oakland, California, he backs visionary founders building AI-native products for everyday consumers and prosumers, with a particular thesis around generational behavior shifts - specifically Gen Z and Gen Alpha. His portfolio spans consumer tech, gaming, entertainment, social platforms, live streaming commerce, and digital health, with notable investments including Perplexity AI and Dapper Labs. He brings a global perspective from prior roles at ChinaRock Capital Management, Pereg Ventures, and engineering and consulting stints at Macquarie Group and Capco.
Reid Christian
Reid Christian is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of the longest-running venture firms in Silicon Valley. A former college basketball captain who grew up on a dirt road in rural Maine, he joined CRV in 2017 after stints at Battery Ventures, Symmetric Capital, and startup Salsify. Reid focuses on early-stage B2B companies - particularly developer tools, security, infrastructure, and vertical SaaS - and has backed breakout companies including Vercel, Postman, Tailscale, Factorial, Squire, and Clerk. His investment thesis centers on founder-market fit and the expanding role of developers as enterprise buyers.
Will Bitsky
Will Bitsky is an Investment Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) on the American Dynamism team, focused on investing in companies that support the national interest - spanning aerospace, defense, energy, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, and manufacturing. Before a16z, he was an investor at FirstMark Capital where he backed enterprise, fintech, and consumer internet companies at seed and Series A stages. He got his start in TMT investment banking at Goldman Sachs and holds a B.A. from Cornell University. His current investment thesis centers on a conviction that data - not compute - determines who wins in the physical AI era.
Julien Bek
Julien Bek is a Partner at Sequoia Capital's London office, one of the most storied venture capital firms in the world. A Geneva native who studied at Warwick Business School and the University of Cambridge, he started his career as an entrepreneur — founding one of Europe's first e-cigarette companies at age 18 — before transitioning into venture capital at Global Founders Capital and then Accel Partners. At Accel he backed breakout companies like Revolut, Melio, Miro, and BeReal. He joined Sequoia in September 2023 as a London-based partner focused on early-stage European and global tech companies. In March 2026, he published the widely-read thesis 'Services: The New Software,' arguing that the next trillion-dollar company will sell outcomes rather than software tools, using AI to automate service delivery at scale.
Peter Blackwood
Peter Blackwood is a Partner on the Capital Network team at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads the Consumer vertical and manages the firm's global investor, corporate strategic, and advisory relationships for consumer and gaming companies. A former investment banker with over 15 years in the technology sector - spanning SoundView Technology Group, Janney Montgomery Scott, and JMP Securities - Blackwood brings deep capital markets expertise to a16z portfolio companies navigating equity raises, debt financing, and strategic partnerships. He is co-author of a16z's widely-read '16 Commandments of Raising Equity in a Challenging Market' and joined the board of gaming platform Overwolf following a16z's $75M Series D investment. Off-hours, he chases trout on rivers.
Amar Goel
Amar Goel is a serial entrepreneur and the Co-founder and CEO of Bito, an AI-powered code review and developer productivity platform. He previously co-founded PubMatic, a programmatic advertising exchange that went public on NASDAQ in 2020. Earlier, at age 19, he built Chipshot.com to $30M in annual sales from his parents' garage. He studied Computer Science and Economics at Harvard, raised over $100M in venture capital across his career, and was recognized with the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2011 for Northern California. At Bito, he is building AI agents that give development teams codebase-aware code reviews, with the goal of letting software be built 'at the speed of thought.'
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.
Lilly Iskold
Lilly Iskold is an Analyst at 2048 Ventures, a New York and Boston-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on Vertical AI, Deep Tech, Healthcare, and Biotech. With a B.A. in Biology (minor in Chemistry) from Brandeis University, she brings a rare bench-to-boardroom perspective shaped by hands-on research at the New York Genome Center and Humane Genomics, where she studied RNA's role in cancer development and CAR-T cell therapies. Raised in Livingston, NJ, Lilly fuses scientific rigor with entrepreneurial instinct - she co-founded Crafty Hour, a handmade jewelry business that donated proceeds to the NAACP.
Lucas Hoffmann
Lucas Hoffmann is a Partner at Outlander VC and Head of Business Operations at HavocAI, a maritime autonomy company. A Wake Forest and Emory Business School graduate with corporate roots at ExxonMobil and Delta Air Lines, he pivoted to venture capital in 2021 and built a pre-seed and seed investing practice focused on AI, SaaS, hardware, robotics, fintech, and govtech. He also founded RiskyBreakfast, a media and content venture, and was recognized as a Siemens National Semifinalist in 2010 for ALS research conducted at Columbia University Medical School.
Marcus Zimmerman
Marcus Zimmerman dropped out of Stanford two quarters shy of graduation to co-found Candor (YC W25), an AI platform that helps defense, biotech, and energy startups win U.S. government funding. Before building Candor, he led Stanford's DEFCON Tech and National Security Network, served as a Defense Innovation Scholar at Stanford's Gordian Knot Center, and sourced deals as a Venture Partner at GoAhead Ventures in Menlo Park. He sits at the rare intersection of venture capital, national security, and applied AI.