seed-stage
(75)
Jing Zhu
Jing Zhu is the Founder and CEO of Duet (Dashboard Story, Inc.), a B2B SaaS platform built for non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) providers across the United States. A Cornell PhD-turned-Berkeley MBA, she spent a decade in corporate healthcare before founding Duet — first as a neighborhood carpooling app, then pivoting to a full-stack dispatching and billing platform that helps wheelchair, stretcher, and ambulatory transport operators run leaner and get paid faster. Based in San Francisco, Zhu leads a 12-person team and has raised $120K in seed funding.
Jon Carter
Jon Carter is the CEO and Founder of Prado, an Austin-based technology platform that connects physicians, nutrition providers, and food businesses to make food function as medicine — unlocking $170 billion in pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars for medically tailored meals. Before Prado, Carter built a career spanning digital product leadership at Union Bank and Live Nation (where he ran eCommerce for 600+ artist brands including Jay-Z and Madonna), and CEO of Snap Kitchen. His father died from type 2 diabetes, and that loss transformed into a professional mission: eliminate the friction preventing food from operating as healthcare.
Katrin Kaurov
Katrin Kaurov is the Estonian co-founder and CEO of Frich, a New York based social finance app that lets Gen Z anonymously compare how their peers spend, save and invest. A former international model who worked across 20+ countries before age 18, she went on to Harvard's entrepreneurship program and built Frich with co-founder Aleksandra Medina out of a shared NYC apartment.
Chris Knape
Chris Knape is the CEO and co-founder of Rare Candy, a marketplace and toolkit for trading card collectors that has scanned more than five million cards. He spent a decade inside marketplaces and platforms - YouTube, Google Play, Thumbtack, Tempo - before turning a pandemic-era return to childhood card collecting into a venture-backed company built alongside Pokemon YouTuber Leonhart. Raised on a sailboat in the US Virgin Islands and trained at Dartmouth, BCG, and the youngest-manager ranks of early YouTube, he now spends his days authenticating, auctioning, and tracking the cards that nerds love.
Halen Mattison
Halen Mattison is the co-founder and CEO of General Galactic, an El Segundo space-propulsion company building Genesis, a water-fueled engine that aims to combine hydrazine-level thrust with xenon-level efficiency. A former SpaceX engineer who worked on propellant generation for Starship, he left after being told his Mars-fuel vision was too long-term, studied at Stanford, and started the company to build the propulsion and propellant infrastructure he believes will become a railroad to Mars. The company raised roughly $9.9M across pre-seed and seed rounds and first emerged converting CO2 into methane on Earth before sharpening its focus on high-agility spacecraft and water-based propulsion.
Ian Koons
Ian Koons is the co-founder and CEO of Karoo Health, an Albuquerque-based startup building tech-enabled, value-based cardiovascular care. A former college tennis player who once did post-game radio for an NFL team, Koons turned a personal loss - a best friend's fatal heart attack in 2014 - into a company that pairs on-site and virtual care teams with software to help cardiologists move from volume to value. Since founding Karoo in 2021, he has grown it to dozens of employees, raised seed funding, partnered with cardiology networks across roughly a dozen states, and teamed with Heartbeat Health to assemble a national end-to-end cardiac care solution.
Jake Horowitz
Jake Horowitz is the co-founder and CEO of Offcall, a San Francisco company building financial and career tools by and for physicians, aiming to cut burnout by making doctor pay transparent. He learned to build audiences the hard way as the co-founder and editor-at-large of Mic, the millennial news outlet that grew from a basement project into a 30-million-reader brand and interviewed figures from Barack Obama to Bill Gates before its 2018 sale. A Stanford history graduate and 2014 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, he married an emergency room nurse and turned her world into his next company.
Tom Nakata
Tom Nakata (Tomofumi Nakata) is the co-founder and CEO of Qlay, a San Francisco AI startup he built after stints at McKinsey, J.P. Morgan, and Disney and a Harvard statistics degree. Qlay began as a generative-AI consumer-sentiment engine and pivoted into AI-powered interview proctoring - eye-gaze tracking, speech-cadence analysis, and multi-camera monitoring that catches AI-assisted cheating in remote technical interviews. Raised across Singapore, Tokyo, and California, Nakata describes his team as 'a shark that never stops,' chasing authenticity and measurable impact while sourcing engineering talent across Africa, Vietnam, and beyond.
Mohammad Noshad
Mohammad Noshad is Co-Founder and CEO of Shyld AI, the company behind the world's first AI-driven autonomous UV-C disinfection system for hospitals. A Harvard-trained researcher with a PhD from the University of Virginia, Noshad pivoted from academic work in signal processing and optical communications to building technology that attacks the $50+ billion annual problem of hospital-acquired infections. Shyld AI's ceiling-mounted devices use multimodal sensors and edge AI to autonomously identify contaminated surfaces and inactivate pathogens - killing MRSA in 10 seconds from 6.5 feet away - with pilots running at Stanford Health Care and Loma Linda University Medical Center. Noshad is also co-founder of Wodio.AI and a Strategic Advisor at Field AI.
Amy Saper
Amy Saper is a General Partner at Uncork Capital, the San Francisco seed firm where she backs AI-enabled B2B, developer tools, API-first infrastructure, and fintech founders. Before investing, she shipped product at Twitter, Uber, and Stripe; before Uncork, she spent four years as an early-stage partner at Accel, leading checks into Gamma, Sprinter Health, Beam, and Complete.
Benjamin Orthlieb
Benjamin (Ben) Orthlieb is co-founder and General Partner of Blue Moon VC, an AI-native seed fund (formerly 2.12 Angels / 2|Twelve) based in San Francisco. He spent over a decade at LinkedIn, most recently as VP and Head of Corporate Development for M&A and Investments, before turning a side scout practice with Emergence Capital into a quantitative seed firm that screens roughly 9,000 founding teams a year and graduates portfolio companies to Series A at nearly triple the market rate.
Dror Nahumi
Dror Nahumi is a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, a multi-stage global VC firm managing $15.5 billion in assets. Based in Menlo Park, California, he leads Norwest's Israeli investment portfolio - a practice he helped build since the firm established its Israel presence in 2009. A former Bell Labs research engineer who developed the RCELP speech coder (now the CDMA standard for North American cellular), Nahumi transitioned from deep tech to entrepreneurship before landing in venture capital in 2010. He has backed companies that have been acquired by Microsoft, Google, EMC, and Symantec, and has seeded unicorns including Gong.io, VAST Data, and Weka.
Eric Rosenblum
Eric Rosenblum is a General Partner at Xora Innovation, a Temasek-backed early-stage venture firm investing in AI infrastructure, applied AI, and deep tech. Based in Silicon Valley, he is the firm's first US-based GP, bridging Southeast Asian capital with American innovation. Before Xora, he built Foothill Ventures into a leading deep-tech seed fund and spent his career as an operator at Google, Palantir, and as founder/executive at two acquired startups. A Harvard and MIT Sloan graduate raised in Steubenville, Ohio, he brings a rare combination of big-tech product leadership, China market experience, and hands-on startup scaling to his role as investor.
Frédérique Dame
Frédérique Dame is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where she leads investments in consumer technology, life sciences, and AI. A French immigrant who moved to Silicon Valley at 24, she built her career as a product and engineering leader at Yahoo!, Photobucket, SmugMug, and Uber — where she helped scale the company from 80 employees to 7,000+ across 68 countries. At GV she co-leads the Women's Health investment team and has backed companies including Midi Health, Found, Allara, Oula Health, and TMRW. She serves on the board of Les Mills International and previously on Ubisoft's board, and was named to Rock Health's Top 50 in Digital Health.
Joanne Chen
Joanne Chen is a General Partner at Foundation Capital, a Palo Alto-based venture capital firm, where she leads the Enterprise practice with a focus on AI-first B2B applications and data platforms. The daughter of Chinese immigrants - a mathematician father who came to North America after Tiananmen Square and a computer scientist mother - Chen built her first client webpage at age nine, studied electrical engineering at UC Berkeley, and went from Cisco engineer to Wall Street banker to startup co-founder before landing in venture capital. She became Foundation Capital's second female General Partner in its 26-year history in 2021 (the first since co-founder Kathryn Gould), has backed category-defining companies like TubiTV (acquired by Fox for ~$500M), Jasper.AI, and Tonkean, and is a recognized voice on AI investing through TEDx talks and podcast appearances.
Ilana Stern
Ilana Stern is a General Partner at Peterson Ventures, a seed-stage venture firm based in Salt Lake City, Utah. A Stanford GSB alumna and former founder, she built and sold Weddington Way - a direct-to-consumer bridal fashion platform - to Gap Inc. in 2016 before joining Peterson Ventures in 2019 as its first San Francisco-based partner. She invests primarily in early-stage consumer, enterprise, and healthcare technology companies, while also lecturing at Stanford GSB and writing a Substack newsletter called 'View from the Bottom.'
James Hardiman
James Hardiman is a General Partner at DCVC (Data Collective Venture Capital), a deep tech-focused VC firm based in Palo Alto. A physicist by training with a BS in Engineering Physics from UC Berkeley and an MBA from University of Chicago Booth, he has been investing at DCVC since 2013 - backing companies at the intersection of hard science and transformative industry applications. His portfolio spans AI-native biotech, quantum computing, industrial robotics, and advanced materials, with board seats at companies including Lumafield, Q-CTRL, NOETIK, and Slip Robotics. Promoted to General Partner in July 2023, Hardiman brings a rare combination of hands-on technical experience (Lam Research, semiconductor processing) and strategic consulting chops (ZS Associates in healthcare/biotech, Blackstone in M&A) to his work as a deep tech investor.
James Green
James Green is a General Partner at CRV, one of the oldest early-stage venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, where he focuses on cybersecurity, fintech, developer tools, and B2B SaaS from pre-seed through Series B. A Harvard-educated cognitive neuroscience and evolutionary psychology graduate who rowed varsity crew for four years, Green grew up in Redditch, England, broke into venture capital through cold emails, and spent nearly five years at Insight Partners deploying ~$1B globally before joining CRV. Known for backing scrappy, conviction-driven founders, his portfolio includes Astrix Security, Legit Security, Finley Technologies, and Trail Security.
Luke Day
Luke Day is Co-founder and General Partner at MAGIC Fund, a $30M seed-stage venture firm built on the conviction that the best founders want money from people who've built things themselves. Focused on gaming, metaverse, and sports investments, Day came up through engineering recruiting at Discord and Roblox before co-founding one of the few truly decentralized VC funds - a 12-partner, multi-continent operation where each GP invests autonomously from their own domain expertise. MAGIC Fund's portfolio spans 250+ startups across 30+ countries with one unicorn (Retool) and a reported 5x return on its debut fund.
Jinlin Wang
Jinlin Wang arrived in the United States in 1996 with $50 in his pocket and a borrowed one-way ticket to pursue a PhD in electrical engineering. Three decades later, he is General Partner at Foothill Ventures, an early-stage fund that has backed seven seed-stage unicorns - five of them founded by Chinese immigrant engineers. Wang's career spans big tech (PeopleSoft, Oracle, Yahoo, Microsoft), startup founding (Auryc, acquired by Heap in 2022), and venture investing through three successive funds totaling over $311M. He holds 7 patents and a cross-disciplinary worldview shaped by Tsinghua University, the University of Connecticut, and Stanford - a combination that informs his conviction that the most interesting startups sit at the edges between fields.
John Gleeson
John Gleeson is the Founder and General Partner of Success Venture Partners, a $10M seed-stage venture firm in San Francisco laser-focused on the post-sales customer success space. A Canadian-born operator who scaled customer success from $1M to $300M+ ARR at KeepTruckin (now Motive), John built the world's largest Customer Success Meetup communities in San Francisco and New York before turning his practitioner network into a differentiated LP base of over 87 Chief Customer Officers from companies like Slack, GitHub, Braze, and Notion. He bets on founders who are obsessively close to their customers, treating customer success not as a support function but as the primary engine of enterprise value.
Jon Eberly
Jon Eberly is a serial entrepreneur and digital marketing thought leader turned venture capitalist, serving as General Partner at Sentiero Ventures, a Dallas-based $10M AI-focused seed fund. He founded Clock Four in 2006, built it into a 50-person San Francisco digital agency serving U.S. Bank and Juniper Networks, then sold it to Hero Digital in 2018 — one of multiple self-funded exits in his career. Today he backs early-stage AI-enabled SaaS companies alongside David Evans and Kishore Khandavalli, bringing deep operator experience in digital strategy, customer experience, and adtech to founders navigating the earliest chapters of company building.
Julien Nguyen
Julien Nguyen is a French-educated General Partner at IT-Farm Corporation, a Tokyo-and-Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm with ~$100M under management across seven funds. A serial entrepreneur who founded four startups before pivoting to venture capital, he holds 21 US patents and was an early investor in Zoom (Series A), Wish, and Treasure Data. Based in Menlo Park, California, he bridges the US and Japanese technology ecosystems, helping global startups expand into Japan and Asia while backing transformative technologies in digital health, IoT, robotics, and AI.
Kesha Cash
Kesha Cash is the Founder and General Partner of Impact America Fund, the largest VC firm in America run entirely by a Black woman. Based in Oakland, California, she manages $65 million across two funds, backing technology-enabled startups that serve low-to-moderate income and overlooked communities. Her portfolio includes Esusu (a fintech unicorn), Mayvenn, SoLo Funds, and CareAcademy. A former Wall Street analyst who grew up on a farm in South Carolina and was the first in her family to attend college, Cash draws on lived experience of economic inequality to identify billion-dollar opportunities that traditional investors routinely miss.
Kirill Kirykov
Kirill Kirykov is a General Partner at SID Venture Partners, the first Ukrainian high-tech venture capital firm, and co-founder and CTO of Datrics.ai, a Y Combinator W21 company building low-code AI analytics for enterprises. A mathematician-turned-principal-architect with 13+ years in IT, he spent a decade co-founding and scaling 4IRE Labs in blockchain and fintech before pivoting to venture. He brings rare technical depth to the VC table - fluent in Ethereum, enterprise AI, and production software at scale - making him the partner founders call when the deal hinges on the architecture, not the pitch deck.
Michael McBride
Michael McBride is a General Partner at GV (Google Ventures), where he leads early-stage investments in enterprise technology, AI, and open-source-powered companies. A Stanford-trained mechanical engineer who spent three decades building high-growth startups before pivoting to venture capital, McBride brought operational credibility from five years as GitLab's CRO - where he oversaw a 100x+ revenue run-rate expansion before its 2021 IPO. He joined GV in December 2023 and quickly became one of its most active dealmakers, leading GV's $319 million Cribl Series E - the firm's second-largest investment ever.
Natalie Vais
Natalie Vais is a General Partner at Spark Capital in San Francisco, where she backs early-stage founders building developer-first tools, platforms, and infrastructure. A former Oracle engineer, Google Cloud product lead, and Amplify Partners principal, she brings rare technical depth to VC - having personally shipped databases and distributed systems before writing checks. Her portfolio includes TigerBeetle, MotherDuck, Polar Signals, and ElectricSQL. While at Google, her team's carbon-monitoring satellite imagery project was named one of TIME Magazine's 100 Best Inventions of 2020.
Neeraj Gupta
Neeraj Gupta is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Cervin Ventures, a Palo Alto-based early-stage venture firm he co-founded with Preetish Nijhawan. Cervin has deployed capital across 50+ companies focusing on enterprise software, data & AI, cybersecurity, DevOps, and cloud - with over $335M in assets under management after closing a $162M flagship fund in September 2023. Before venture, Gupta ran two companies: Cymbal Corporation, a telecom consultancy he sold to Patni Computers, and Nexient, a digital experience consulting firm. He holds a MSEE from the University of Alabama, a BS from Punjab University, and is a Kauffman Fellow (Class 20). Outside the office he hikes, travels, and reads widely on Stoicism and public policy.
Paul Weinstein
Paul Weinstein is the Founder, General Partner, and COO of Azure Capital Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm he founded in 2000 with over $750 million under management across 8 funds and more than 200 investments. A former top-ranked Wall Street equity research analyst covering data communications at firms including Credit Suisse First Boston and Deutsche Bank, Paul transitioned from sell-side analyst to VC investor and has backed transformative technology companies including Docker, VMware, Salesforce (via Prediction.io), and Calix. He focuses on early and mid-stage ventures in cloud infrastructure, enterprise software, AI, and communications technology across North America.
Raj Singh
Raj Shekhar Singh is the Founder and General Partner of z21 Ventures, a community-first, operator-led early-stage VC firm investing at the pre-seed and seed stages across AI, fintech, enterprise software, and healthcare. An IIT Kharagpur BTech graduate with a PhD from UC Berkeley, Singh built his career from McKinsey to founding executive roles at Innovaccer (now a $3.5B healthtech unicorn) before launching z21 in 2022. The firm's $5M Fund I backed 26 startups and has already achieved two exits; Fund II closed its first $20M tranche with WestBridge Capital as anchor investor and is targeting $40M total.