spark-capital
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Spark Capital Bet on Products Before They Became Markets
The venture firm behind Twitter, Tumblr, Oculus and Anthropic built its reputation by treating taste as diligence and patience as a product. Twenty-one years in, its dog logo still says more about the strategy than a spreadsheet does.
Ravin Thambapillai
Ravin Thambapillai is the co-founder and CEO of Credal.ai, a New York security-first platform that lets large, regulated enterprises deploy AI agents without leaking the data those agents touch. A philosophy-politics-economics graduate from Oxford who taught himself to code into a job at Google, he spent seven years at Palantir building AI systems for banks, life-sciences firms, and public-health institutions before starting Credal in 2022, months ahead of the ChatGPT wave. Backed by Y Combinator and a $4.8M seed led by Spark Capital, Credal serves customers like MongoDB, Wise, Checkr, and the US government, processing over a million LLM queries a month.
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.
Sean Williams
Sean Williams is the British founder and CEO of AutogenAI, a generative-AI platform that drafts winning bids and proposals up to eight times faster than humans. A Cambridge philosophy graduate who studied logic and feminist philosophy, he spent a decade designing large-scale public employment programs before building and selling the training company Corndel for a reported 47 million pounds. He launched AutogenAI in late 2021, shipped its first product in September 2022, and raised more than 60 million dollars across Series A and B rounds backed by Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital and Blossom Capital. Off the clock he is a serious open-level backgammon player and a collector of rare guitars.
AutogenAI
AutogenAI builds custom AI language engines that help enterprises and government bodies write bids, tenders, proposals and grant applications faster and more persuasively. Founded in late 2021 by former bid writer Sean Williams, the company applies generative natural-language technology to a slow, manual process, claiming roughly 30% higher win rates and up to 85% lower writing costs for clients. Backed by Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital and Blossom Capital, it has raised $65.3M and serves Fortune 500 companies, consultancies, construction firms, government agencies and nonprofits from offices in New York, London and Brisbane.
Cardless
Cardless is a San Francisco fintech that gives consumer and product-led brands the infrastructure to launch and run their own co-branded credit cards. Its API-first platform handles the parts most companies never want to touch - underwriting, compliance, issuing-bank relationships, rewards and servicing - so a brand can ship a branded card inside its own app in weeks instead of the year-plus a legacy bank program takes. Founded in 2019, Cardless powers cards for partners including Coinbase, Bilt, Qatar Airways, Alibaba.com and Simon, and raised a $60M Series C led by Spark Capital in September 2025.
Mastra
Mastra is an open-source TypeScript framework for building production-ready AI agents, workflows, and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. Built by the team behind Gatsby, it gives developers agents, durable workflows, memory, RAG, tool calling, evals, and observability in one stack - so JavaScript and TypeScript engineers can move from prototype to production without leaving their language. Mastra is developed by Kepler Software, a San Francisco startup, and reached 25,000+ GitHub stars and 300,000+ weekly npm downloads with adoption at companies like Brex, Sanity, Replit, and PayPal.
John Melas-Kyriazi
John Melas-Kyriazi is the co-founder and CEO of Standard Metrics, a San Francisco financial data platform that automates reporting between venture investors and their portfolio companies. A Stanford-trained engineer who once tinkered with guitar pedals in his basement, he spent six years investing at Spark Capital before noticing that the venture industry ran its data on spreadsheets and email. He left to fix it, building a networked system where startups and investors collaborate on the same numbers. He is also an active angel investor in 40-plus companies.
Salomon Serfati
Salomon Serfati is the co-founder and CEO of Chariot, the New York fintech building payment rails for the $326 billion donor-advised fund market. Its flagship product, DAFpay, turned the clunky multi-step process of donating from a DAF into a three-click checkout button now live on over 100,000 nonprofit donation forms, from the American Cancer Society to GoFundMe, and was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2025. A University of Pennsylvania computer scientist and former BlackRock engineer who opened a separate 10%-of-income charity account with his first paycheck, Serfati turned a personal tithing habit into financial infrastructure for giving.
Sam Bhagwat
Sam Bhagwat is the founder and CEO of Mastra, an open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents that pulls in millions of monthly downloads. He earlier co-founded Gatsby, the React-based web framework used by hundreds of thousands of developers and later acquired by Netlify. A Stanford economics grad and longtime open-source builder, he wrote 'Modular: The Web's New Architecture' and 'Principles of Building AI Agents,' the latter dubbed by one YC founder 'the most popular book in San Francisco.' Mastra went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch and raised a $22M Series A led by Spark Capital.
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.
Pika
Pika is a San Francisco-based generative AI company building a consumer video platform that turns text, images, and clips into short cinematic videos. Founded in 2023 by Stanford AI Lab alumni Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, Pika has shipped a string of fast-iterating model releases (Pika 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.1, 2.2) and viral features like Pikaffects, Scene Ingredients, and Pikaframes. The company has raised roughly $135M from Spark Capital, Lightspeed, Greycroft, and others.
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.
Yasmin Razavi
Yasmin Razavi is a General Partner at Spark Capital, where she leads growth-stage investments in fintech, enterprise software, and AI infrastructure. Born in Tehran and educated at the University of Toronto (engineering) and Harvard Business School (MBA), she brings an operator's lens to venture - forged at McKinsey, Index Ventures, and Snap's monetization team. Since joining Spark in 2017, she has backed defining companies including Deel, Marqeta, Anthropic (leading its $450M Series C), and Qdrant, and now sits on Anthropic's Board of Directors.
David Haber
David Haber is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), based in New York City - the firm's first full-time GP in Manhattan. A Harvard-trained biochemist turned fintech operator-investor, Haber founded Bond Street (acquired by Goldman Sachs in 2017), seeded Plaid at Spark Capital, and now co-leads a16z's AI Apps fund with a focus on vertical AI, enterprise software, and financial services. Known as the 'super-connector' who bridges Wall Street and Silicon Valley, he sits on the boards of Camber, Crux, Eve, Moment, Rutter, Setpoint, and Tennr.
Demi Guo
Demi Guo is the co-founder and CEO of Pika, an AI-powered video generation platform that has raised $135 million and reached a $470 million valuation. A Harvard math-and-CS graduate and Stanford PhD dropout, she holds silver medals from the International Olympiad in Informatics and gold medals from the Math Prize for Girls. Before founding Pika in April 2023, she was the youngest full-time researcher at Meta AI. Her platform, which lets anyone create cinematic videos from a text prompt, reached 16.4 million users and inspired Pika 2.2 features that went viral with an 800% user surge.
Bijan Sabet
Bijan Sabet is a first-generation American venture capitalist, co-founder of Spark Capital, and former U.S. Ambassador to the Czech Republic. The son of Iranian and Korean immigrants who met in a New York medical school, he drove from Boston to Silicon Valley after a 1991 Macworld, built foundational consumer internet companies, then returned east to co-found Spark Capital in 2005 - backing Twitter when it had 11 employees, Tumblr before it sold to Yahoo for $1.1 billion, and Discord before it became the home for every online community. After stepping back from Spark in 2021, President Biden appointed him Ambassador to Prague, where he served until January 2025. He is also a film photographer, board member of Human Rights Watch, and trustee at Boston College.
Nabeel Hyatt
Nabeel Hyatt is a General Partner at Spark Capital, the Boston-born venture firm behind Discord, Coinbase, Affirm, and Warby Parker. A repeat founder-turned-investor, he opened Spark's San Francisco office in 2012 after selling his social gaming startup Conduit Labs to Zynga and riding Zynga's IPO. His portfolio reads like a cultural highlight reel: he backed Cruise before GM paid $1B+, Postmates before Uber, and Discord before it became the connective tissue of the internet. He deliberately makes only about two bets per year, applies a 'Japanese toilet' product lens to AI, co-hosts the Hallway Chat podcast, and recently co-founded a physical board game library in Berkeley with Groupon's Andrew Mason.