Venture with Grace

Jeremiah Owyang is a Silicon Valley–based General Partner at Blitzscaling Ventures, where he leads early-stage AI investing focused on startups that can rapidly scale by leveraging network effects and defensible distribution. A longtime tech analyst and operator since the dot-com era, he has anticipated and helped shape multiple innovation waves from Web 2.0 to today’s AI agent ecosystem, drawing...

Lance Matthews is a partner at DTCP and is responsible for sourcing investment opportunities and making investment recommendations in the US. Lance’s DTCP investments include: Arctic wolf networks, Innovid (NYSE: CTV), StreetlightData (acquired by Jacobs), and Cohere. Lance joined from Touchdown Ventures, a SF based Corporate Venture firm, where he worked on company sourcing, investment analysis a...

Paul serves as the Managing Partner at Depth Ventures, a pre-seed and seed-stage venture firm focused on backing B2B SaaS founders at the intersection of finance and AI operations, leveraging his extensive operator experience as former CFO of AI-powered accounting platform Pilot and VP of Corporate Finance & Strategy at Dropbox to guide teams in building scalable business models and data-drive...

Ali Ansari is the Founder and CEO of micro1, an AI-powered recruitment platform he launched in 2022 to help companies vet and hire top global engineering and domain talent using advanced screening models. A Bay Area-based entrepreneur, he previously built a successful software development agency and other ventures, experiences that directly informed micro1’s focus on scalable, AI-led talent assess...

Or Lenchner is the CEO of Bright Data, a market-leading web data collection platform he has led since 2018, where he has driven the company’s expansion and innovation to well over $300 million in annual revenue while serving thousands of customers, including Fortune 500 enterprises, leading businesses, universities, and public sector organizations. A former founder and operator of several web-base...

Omar Haroun is the founder and CEO of Eudia, a next‑generation augmented intelligence platform for legal teams that has rapidly scaled into a nine‑figure venture‑backed business, attracting over $100M in capital from top‑tier investors on the back of triple‑digit annual growth and adoption across dozens of Fortune 500 legal departments. A second‑time legal‑AI founder, he previously co‑founded Text...

Bob Rosin is the Managing Partner at Antler US, a global early-stage venture capital firm with over $1B in assets under management and investments in more than 1,500 companies. A three-time startup founder who raised over $130M from top investors like Sequoia and Marc Andreessen, he led his third venture, Qik, to a $150M acquisition by Skype, followed by roles as VP of Business Development at Skyp...

Hemal Shah is a seasoned product leader currently serving as Product lead at OpenAI, where he focuses on integrating ChatGPT into workplace tools like Slack and developing features such as company knowledge powered by GPT-5. Previously, he was VP of Product, Head of Growth, Monetization & Expansion at Atlassian, Chief Product Officer at Root Inc. (NASDAQ: ROOT), and held product roles at Insta...

Jim Tananbaum is the founder and CEO of Foresite Capital, a U.S.-focused healthcare investment firm he launched in 2011 that manages approximately $3.5 billion in assets. With a career spanning three decades, Jim has partnered with some of the fastest-growing and most influential healthcare companies of their generation, including 10x Genomics, Amerigroup, and Jazz Pharmaceuticals. A lifelong stud...

Ashley Smith is the GP and Founder of Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, where she backs early-stage technical founders building in AI, developer tools, data, security, and infrastructure. Previously, she served as Global Vice President of Marketing at GitHub through its acquisition by Microsoft, Chief Marketing Officer at GitLab, and Venture Partner at OpenView. Her extensive go-to-market leadership at d...

Philip Rathle is the Chief Technology Officer of Neo4j, where he has spent more than a decade helping transform the company from a niche on‑premise database into a leading global graph database and analytics platform used in modern AI and data-intensive applications. With over 25 years in enterprise data, he previously led Neo4j’s product organization, growing ARR from under seven figures to well...

Igor Taber is the founder and General Partner of Cortical Ventures, an early-stage AI-focused venture fund launched in 2021 to invent, incubate, and invest in companies driving the AI revolution. Previously, he served as SVP of Corporate Development at DataRobot, where he shaped growth strategy, raised over $500 million in capital, and managed M&A and partnerships; before that, as Managing Dir...

Dave Steer is Chief Marketing Officer at Webflow, where he leads global marketing to scale the company’s enterprise growth and AI-powered digital experience strategy. A veteran marketing leader, he brings two decades of experience across B2C, B2B, and developer marketing, with prior senior roles at GitLab, Cloudflare, Facebook, Twitter, PayPal, eBay, TRUSTe, and the Electronic Frontier Foundation....

Flaviu Radulescu and Ioana Hreninciuc are the co-founders of Runware, an AI infrastructure company focused on making high-performance generative media dramatically more affordable and accessible for developers and product teams worldwide. Drawing on over two decades of Flaviu’s experience building bare-metal data clusters and custom hardware, Runware designs its own GPU and networking systems plus...

Josh Sirota is the founder and CEO of Eragon, an AI operating system for work that connects to a company’s business apps and uses custom agents to provide unified, on-demand insights across everything from sales forecasts to product analytics. Based in San Francisco, he founded Eragon to help teams run their companies “from idea to IPO,” after earlier roles in enterprise software sales and go-to-m...

Jack Raines is a Forward Deployed Personality Hire at Slow Ventures, where he scouts the bold, the obsessive, and the slightly unhinged founders building the next wave of breakout companies. Before VC, Jack built a 65,000-subscriber Substack that landed him a Penguin book deal, wrote 50,000 words in 14 days, and worked across Robinhood’s Sherwood News, Litquidity, and UPS. A creator turned investo...

Denise Teng is a Partner at Gradient. Prior to joining Gradient, Denise spent six years as a product manager. Most recently, she was a PM on the Meta AI platform team where she built infrastructure tools for ML workflows. Denise previously spent time at Twitter as a senior PM where she launched products ranging from ad tech and social commerce to real-time data analytics. After grad school, she jo...

Rob Ferguson is the CTO and Head of AI at Microsoft for Startups, where he helps high‑growth founders access GPUs, frontier models, and strategic partnerships to scale AI products. A veteran engineering leader with more than two decades in AI and infrastructure, he previously served as Global Head of AI/ML for Startups and VC at AWS and has been a three‑time startup CTO/VPE with over $100M in exit...

Chappy Asel serves as Co-Founder and Executive Director of The AI Collective, the largest grassroots AI community in the US with over 25,000 members across major tech hubs, fostering in-person events and online forums for founders, researchers, operators, and investors to shape AI's future. A self-taught coder from age 12, he built and sold the world's #1 homework app with 338k installs be...

Madison is a Partner at NEA investing in early-stage data, infrastructure, developer tools, data science, and AI and she also leads the data and AI initiative internally for data-driven investment decision-making. She has invested in and works with companies including Factory, Datafold, Metabase, Foresight Data, Delphina, Fixify, World Labs, Sakana and more. Prior to investing, Madison was Head of...

Alex Lee is the Co-Founder and CEO at Truewind, a venture-backed technology startup building AI for Accountants. Trusted by 200+ businesses and accounting firms, including EisnerAmper and Frank Rimerman, Truewind raised $17 million from Thomson Reuters Ventures, Rho Capital, Pathlight Ventures, and Y Combinator. Previously, Alex was a venture capital investor at Alliance Ventures and Schematic Ven...

Harry Qi is the co-founder and CEO of Motion, an AI-native productivity company building an “agentic work suite” that uses autonomous agents to manage calendars, tasks, and workflows for knowledge workers and SMBs. A former hedge fund analyst, he left a seven‑figure finance career in his early 20s to found Motion in 2019 with friends Omid Rooholfada and Ethan Yu, taking the company through Y Combi...

Robert LoCascio Founded a new company in 2023 called Eternos.life which became Uare.ai and is providing a platform for prosumers and consumers to create their own individual AIs for both work and personal use. Previously, Rob was the Founder of LivePerson, Inc. (LPSN: NASDAQ ), and was its Chief Executive Officer from 1995 to 2023. He was the guiding force behind the company’s vision of creating m...

Gabriel Jarrosson is the Founder and Managing Partner of Lobster Capital, an early-stage fund that invests exclusively in the top-performing Y Combinator startups. After bootstrapping a prior company to $1M ARR with no employees and investing tens of millions of dollars across 100+ YC companies, he built Lobster Capital around a traction- and data-driven thesis, backing the top 2% of YC teams and...

Benjamin Orthlieb is the Co-Founder & GP at Blue Moon, a seed fund backing B2B founders across North America. Ben is building a modern venture model — human focused, powered by data and AI. Founders consistently tell him they love the approach because it feels like working with a tech startup as much as a VC. Before Blue Moon, Benjamin spent nearly two decades leading strategy, M&A, and ve...