Venture with Grace

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...

Gil Rosen is the President of the Stanford Blockchain Accelerator, and co-teacher of CEE246A Web3 Entrepreneurship in the Stanford School of Engineering. Gil aims to nurture the future of Blockchain and Web3 as a sustainable force for good - building infrastructure, organizational models, and technology, that serve humanity and our ecosystem rather than extract. Gil is the founder of HeadandHeart....

Ville Tuulos is the Co-founder & CEO of Outerbounds. Outerbounds is a company developing modern human-centric ML. Ville has been developing infrastructure for machine learning for over two decades. He has worked as an ML researcher in academia and as a leader at a number of companies, including Netflix where he led the ML infrastructure team that created Metaflow, a popular open-source framewo...

Jason Saltzman, Head of Insights at CB Insights. Jason leads the insights function at CB Insights, delivering predictive intelligence on the companies and technologies defining the future. Prior to CB Insights, Jason led marketing and insights at Live Data Technologies and built GTM functions for 25+ startups at Verbatim. He is also a former professional cyclist. Topics: The future of AI, enterpri...

Vivek Ladsariya is a Managing Director at PSL and general partner of PSL's venture capital firm, PSL Ventures. Vivek will play a pivotal role in leading external pre-seed and seed investments out of PSL Ventures’ $100 million Fund II, actively investing in new Pacific Northwest technology companies. The majority of the fund’s portfolio consists of companies where PSL Ventures led an initial ro...

Aditya Naganath joined Kleiner Perkins’ investment team in 2022 with a focus on artificial intelligence, enterprise software applications, infrastructure and security. Prior to joining Kleiner Perkins, Aditya was a product manager at Google focusing on growth initiatives for the next billion users team. He previously was a technical lead at Palantir Technologies and formerly held software engineer...

Rachel Holt is Co-founder and General Partner of Construct Capital, an early stage focused venture firm that invests in extraordinary founders who are transforming the most foundational industries of our economy. Sectors such as manufacturing and supply chain to logistics and transportation drive half our economy’s GDP yet lack advanced technology and are failing to meet customer expectations. Bef...

Karen Ng is the executive vice president of product at HubSpot, where she leads product strategy and execution across product management, design, and partnerships with a mission to help millions of organizations grow better. Prior to HubSpot, Karen held head of product roles at Common Room, Google, and Microsoft. At Common Room, a customer intelligence platform, she founded and scaled the product...

Kourosh Zamani is a co-founder of Laurel, the first company to apply AI to time in professional services. Kourosh has experience in various roles in business development, investment, and entrepreneurship. Zamani also founded and served as the Executive Director of Young Professionals of San Francisco, a networking organization with over 8,000 members. Kourosh holds an MBA from the University of Ca...

Anish Srivastava is a seasoned venture capitalist and innovation leader, currently a Venture Partner at Swisscom Ventures, where he focuses on Series A and later-stage investments in enterprise SaaS, AI, cybersecurity, next-gen IT, cloud technologies, and telecom. Anish also leads Telosity Ventures, investing in early-stage startups focused on digital wellness and mental health. In addition, he is...

Ernie is a Managing Director at Forgepoint and focuses on early stage investments. Ernie serves on the Boards of Huntress, DataBahn.ai, 1Kosmos, Synadia, RAD Security, Bishop Fox, and NowSecure. Prior to Forgepoint, Ernie served as the Chief Operating Officer of the Defense Innovation Unit. In that capacity, he was responsible for executing the organization’s strategy to identify and adopt emergin...