seed-investor
(37)
Girish Gaitonde’s second education
He built Xoriant, watched its revenue fall, and rebuilt the business for a wider world. Girish Gaitonde’s career follows an engineer learning what a company must do to last.
Matthew Harrigan and the value of being in the same room
Before Company Ventures wrote checks, Matthew Harrigan helped give founders a place to work. His New York experiment began with a year of free rent and a bet on the people at the next desk.
David Mandel
David Mandel is a Los Angeles entrepreneur and tech investor who co-founded and chairs YEBO, a no-code platform that helps brands build and manage Web3 digital assets, NFTs and blockchain loyalty programs. He is also co-founder and chairman of Bitvore, an AI and machine-learning company whose risk and business-signal data has been used across Wall Street by firms including S&P, Moody's, Fidelity, Wells Fargo, UBS and AIG. A math graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, he holds patents in data visualization and was an early seed investor in companies such as Broadcom, Access360 (acquired by IBM) and Fulcrum Microsystems (acquired by Intel).
Tod Sacerdoti
Tod Sacerdoti is a two-time founder and prolific seed investor. He built BrightRoll into a video ad-tech powerhouse that Yahoo bought for $640 million in 2014, then reassembled the band to start Pipedream, a developer integration platform that Workday acquired in early 2026. As a general partner at Flex Capital he has backed 400-plus companies at the seed stage, including Chime, Vercel, Replit and Mercury.
Justin Wenig
Justin Wenig is the founder and CEO of Starbridge, a New York AI company that helps businesses find and win public-sector contracts. He earlier co-founded Coursedog, a higher-education operations platform he scaled to 300+ institutions before a nine-figure sale to JMI Equity in 2021. A Columbia computer science grad and Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he raised a $42M Series A led by Craft Ventures in October 2025 and angel-invests in 50+ AI startups on the side.
Alejandro Guerrero
Alejandro Guerrero is the Co-Founder and General Partner of Act One Ventures, a Los Angeles micro-VC firm that backs pre-seed and seed companies across vertical SaaS, fintech, compliance, and AI-native enterprise software. A first-generation Mexican-American and former two-time founder, he authored the Diversity Rider, a clause now adopted by hundreds of funds that obligates lead investors to make space on cap tables for underrepresented co-investors. Act One closed a $73M Fund III in 2024 - roughly 3x its prior fund.
Augustin Sayer
Augustin Sayer is co-founder and General Partner at OVNI Capital, a Paris- and San Francisco-based seed fund backing European deep-tech founders building global companies. Before OVNI, he invested 20+ early-stage rounds at Newfund (including FairMoney and Umiami), ran a retail company in Mexico, and started his finance career at Lazard Frères M&A in New York.
Brendan Rogers
Brendan Rogers is the co-founder and general partner of 2am VC, an India-only early-stage venture fund betting on the country's Gen Z founders. Before turning investor, he co-founded Wag!, the on-demand dog-walking app that listed on NASDAQ after raising over $360M, and a social discovery service later acquired by IAC. From bases in Mumbai, Bengaluru, and Los Angeles, he is one of the most visible American VCs operating inside India today.
Loren Straub
Loren Straub is a General Partner at Bowery Capital, a New York-based early-stage venture capital firm focused on enterprise software and B2B SaaS. Based in San Francisco, she spearheaded Bowery's West Coast expansion in 2019, leads investments in supply chain, B2B marketplaces, and enterprise resource planning (ERP), and serves on the boards of nine portfolio companies. Before joining venture capital, she held roles at Goldman Sachs (investment banking), Groupon (corporate finance and APAC FP&A), and Activision Blizzard (investor relations). She is also a Venture Committee Member at The Vinetta Project, supporting female founders.
Paul Johnson
Paul Johnson is a British-American entrepreneur, author, CEO coach, and General Partner at Flex Capital — a $200M+ venture fund backing 200+ category-defining companies including Perplexity, Vercel, Rippling, and Supabase. He founded Lemonaid Health in San Francisco in 2013, pioneering nationwide digital telehealth and prescription delivery, raised $60M+, scaled to nearly 200 employees, and sold the company to 23andMe for $400 million in 2021. Since then, he has written two Nobel laureate biographies, coaches high-growth CEOs, and invests in early-stage AI and fintech startups — while competing in professional-level pickleball tournaments.
Raj Sandhu
Raj Sandhu is a General Partner at Great Oaks Venture Capital, one of the most active seed-stage investors in the United States with a portfolio spanning 345+ companies and 14 unicorns. Armed with an MBA from Harvard Business School and a double-major BS in Computer Science and Economics from Yale, Sandhu brings a rare blend of technical depth and financial acumen to early-stage investing. Over more than two decades, he has backed companies from pre-seed through Series A with check sizes ranging from $50K to $500K, focusing on enterprise software, SaaS, marketplaces, healthcare, and fintech. Before joining Great Oaks, he managed $2 billion in assets at the Chatterjee-Soros Group, led technology banking at Cowen & Co., and co-founded Modulus Video — a video compression company acquired by Motorola in 2007. His portfolio includes breakout names like Hinge, Peek, Acorns, Allbirds, Bolt, Flatiron Health, and Ibotta.
Raphael Schaad
Raphael Schaad is a Swiss designer-engineer and Visiting Partner at Y Combinator who built three generation-defining products: iA Writer (the minimalist writing app), Flipboard (the original social magazine), and Cron (acquired by Notion in 2022). Raised in the Swiss Alps, trained at MIT Media Lab, he brings a rare combination of technical depth and design taste that has made him a go-to mentor for founders navigating the AI era.
Lucian Todea
Lucian Todea is a Romanian-born serial entrepreneur and early-stage investor who built Soft32 from a $3/month passion project into one of the world's largest software distribution platforms, co-founded MultiversX (formerly Elrond) - a pioneering layer-1 blockchain - and now serves as Partner at 2048 Ventures in New York, where he has invested in 200+ companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Chainalysis, Suno, and Kraken. An Ironman finisher and relentless builder, Todea embodies the conviction that technology exists not for its own sake, but to improve and enrich human lives.
Rachel Lyubovitzky
Rachel Lyubovitzky is a serial entrepreneur who has founded four B2B technology companies and exited three of them, generating approximately $12 billion in combined exits with her co-founders. She is the CEO, co-founder, and Chairwoman of Setuply, an AI-powered client onboarding and lifecycle management platform, and a Partner at 2048 Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage VC firm. With a Wharton Executive MBA and a computer science background from Brandeis University, she bridges deep technical fluency with executive leadership - having built and sold companies in HR tech, benefits automation, and search. She is also a Forbes Technology Council member, a published author, and has visited more than 60 countries.
Asheem Chandna
Asheem Chandna is a General Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he has spent over two decades backing category-defining companies in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and AI. Since joining Greylock in 2003, he has never lost capital on a single investment he led - a streak spanning Palo Alto Networks, AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.85B), Rubrik (IPO 2024), Abnormal Security, and Wiz. A Mumbai-raised engineer who cut his teeth at Bell Labs and scaled marketing at Check Point Software from $10M to $550M in revenue, Chandna brings an operator's instinct to early-stage bets, often writing checks before a deck exists. Named to the Forbes Midas List nine times, he is among the most respected cybersecurity investors in the world.
Jenny Lefcourt
Jenny Lefcourt is a General Partner at Freestyle VC, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture capital firm with $565M+ AUM. A serial entrepreneur who dropped out of Stanford GSB to co-found WeddingChannel.com (backed by Kleiner Perkins), she later co-founded Bella Pictures before transitioning to venture capital in 2014. She has since backed iconic companies including Airtable, Patreon, BetterUp, and Intercom, earned spots on the Forbes Midas Seed List and Forbes 50 Over 50, and co-founded All Raise, the nonprofit accelerating female founders and funders in tech.
Niko Bonatsos
Niko Bonatsos is a Greek-born, Stanford-educated venture capitalist who spent 15 years at General Catalyst building one of Silicon Valley's strongest seed-stage consumer investment track records - backing Snap, Discord, Mercor, ClassDojo, and Dubsmash before most people knew they existed. In January 2026 he left General Catalyst to co-found Verdict Capital with Michael Fertik, targeting a $300M fund focused on seed/Series A investing in consumer and AI, with a particular contrarian bet on consumer AI being underappreciated in an enterprise-saturated market.
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.
Eric Paley
Eric Paley is a serial entrepreneur turned seed-stage venture capitalist who co-founded Founder Collective in 2008, building it into one of the world's highest-performing seed funds with investments in Uber, The Trade Desk, Airtable, and 20+ unicorns. Before VC, he co-founded Brontes Technologies — a 3D dental imaging startup spun out of MIT — and sold it to 3M for $95 million in 2006. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (ranked as high as #9 globally and the world's top-ranked seed investor), he became known for his unusually candid critiques of venture capital excess. In June 2025, he left Founder Collective to serve as Massachusetts Secretary of Economic Development under Governor Maura Healey, overseeing a 700-person agency focused on housing affordability, business competitiveness, and the AI innovation economy.
Konstantine Buhler
Konstantine Buhler is a Partner at Sequoia Capital focused on seed and Series A investments in AI, enterprise software, and fintech. An AI engineer turned investor, he brings technical depth from his Stanford CS graduate work and a unique investment philosophy shaped by his grandparents' immigrant journeys. He's a leading voice on the emerging 'agent economy' - a trillion-dollar vision where autonomous AI agents don't just process information but transfer resources, make transactions, and operate their own economic systems. His portfolio includes CaptivateIQ, EDX, Ethos Life, Kumo, and XBOW, with investments guided by the principle of 'virtuous data cycles' where businesses become more valuable as they accumulate customers and data.
Bryan Schreier
Bryan Schreier is a partner on Sequoia Capital's seed and early-stage team, where he's spent nearly two decades building category-defining companies from their earliest days. After launching Google's European headquarters and serving as interim President of Sales in China, he joined Sequoia in 2008 and became the first institutional investor in companies like Dropbox, Qualtrics, and Thumbtack. Known for hands-on board work and detailed founder playbooks, he specializes in marketplace and services infrastructure businesses that transform how work gets done, often partnering with bootstrapped or non-Bay Area founders to help them use data to find product-market fit and scale into category leaders.
Bill Trenchard
Bill Trenchard is a Partner at First Round Capital, a top-tier seed-stage venture capital firm. A serial entrepreneur turned VC, he sold his first company (Jump Networks) to Microsoft at 23, scaled LiveOps to $100M in sales, and made early-stage bets on category-defining companies including Uber, Looker (acquired by Google for $2.6B), Flexport, Notion, Verkada, and Superhuman. Known for creating First Round's Pitch Assist program, he's a fundraising savant who teaches founders his process-driven approach to raising capital. He was named to Forbes Midas List in 2017 (#41) and 2020 (#17), and BusinessWeek's Best Young Technology Entrepreneurs in 2006.
Gigi Levy-Weiss
Gigi Levy-Weiss is a General Partner and co-founder at NFX, a San Francisco-based pre-seed and seed venture capital firm managing $875M+ across 577+ portfolio companies with 25 unicorns. A former Israeli Air Force attack helicopter pilot turned serial entrepreneur, he co-founded Playtika (sold to Caesars for ~$180M; later valued at $4.4B), served as CEO of 888 Holdings (a London-listed online gaming company), and made 150+ angel investments before co-founding NFX in 2015. Known for combining military-grade rigor with a warm, self-deprecating sense of humor, he leads NFX's Israel office and focuses on gaming, bio, space, and generative AI.
Gili Raanan
Gili Raanan is an Israeli cybersecurity pioneer turned venture capitalist who invented CAPTCHA, co-created the world's first Web Application Firewall, and then built Cyberstarts — a seed-only VC that turned $54M into over $1B and backed Wiz, the $32B cloud-security juggernaut acquired by Google in 2025. A decade in IDF Unit 8200, two successful exits, nine years as a Sequoia Capital Israel GP, and $1.4B+ in capital raised makes him arguably the most influential figure in the Israeli cyber startup ecosystem.
Nina Achadjian
Nina Achadjian is a Partner at Index Ventures, one of the world's leading VC firms, where she invests at seed, venture, and growth stages with a focus on AI, robotics, software for hardware, and vertical SaaS. A Harvard-educated former bond trader and Google AdSense leader, she founded HIVE Ventures — the first seed fund for Armenian entrepreneurs — before joining Index. Her portfolio includes Anthropic, ServiceTitan (IPO 2024), Gong, Physical Intelligence, and 20+ other companies. Known for backing category-defining vertical software companies years before they become mainstream, she sits on 24+ company boards.
Pete Flint
Pete Flint is a British-born serial entrepreneur and venture capitalist who co-founded Trulia, the real estate search platform that sold to Zillow for $3.5 billion in 2015. Before that, he was part of the founding team at lastminute.com, which IPO'd in London and sold for $1.1 billion. He is now General Partner at NFX, a seed-stage VC firm built around the thesis that network effects drive 70% of all technology value creation. He was awarded an OBE in 2021 for services to entrepreneurship.
Saar Gur
Saar Gur is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture firms, where he has backed some of the most iconic consumer and SMB software companies of the past decade. Before turning investor, he co-founded BrightRoll, the video ad network that Yahoo acquired for $640 million. Known for betting early on 'weird' ideas before the world caught up, his portfolio includes DoorDash (seed in 2013), Patreon, Ring, Dropbox, Airtable, Mercury, and Niantic. He has ranked on the Forbes Midas List (#22 in 2023), taught at Stanford's StartupGarage, and summits mountains with founders for fun.
Ulili Onovakpuri
Uriridiakoghene 'Ulili' Onovakpuri is a trailblazing venture capitalist who spent 10+ years at Kapor Capital, rising from analyst to Co-Managing Partner and co-raising the firm's largest-ever fund - $126M Fund III in 2022. One of very few Black female managing partners in VC history, she backed 70+ companies with a focus on digital health, health tech, and people operations, while also founding the longest-running VC fellowship program for underrepresented individuals. Her own childhood diagnosis of Juvenile Rheumatoid Arthritis in Hunter's Point, San Francisco, where she grew up, directly shaped her conviction that healthcare access is a systemic justice issue. In May 2025 she departed Kapor Capital for what she called 'a purposeful pause,' and has since joined Motley Fool Ventures as a Venture Partner.
Katie Jacobs Stanton
Katie Jacobs Stanton is the Founder and General Partner of Moxxie Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed-stage venture firm managing $95M+ across three funds. A former VP of Global Media at Twitter, Director of Citizen Participation at the Obama White House, and State Department innovation advisor, she built her reputation deploying technology at the intersection of government, media, and social change - including spearheading the Haiti earthquake text-donation platform that raised $40M in days. Co-founder of #Angels, a collective that has placed capital in 120+ companies, she now backs outlier founders across enterprise software, climate tech, and vertical AI.
Kevin Hartz
Kevin Hartz is a Silicon Valley serial founder and venture investor who co-founded Eventbrite (NYSE: EB) and Xoom (acquired by PayPal for $1.1B), made seed-stage bets on PayPal, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Palantir, Square, Stripe, and Slack, and now runs A* Capital — a $300M early-stage fund that bets heavily on teenage founders. His career spans 30+ years of building and backing transformative tech companies from Berkeley to the world stage.