Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "A larger number of 'application layer' companies will have a breakout year with several crossing $100 million in revenues. I predict 50 companies will cross $50 million ARR while still growing 60%+, and at least 10 will hit $100 million ARR. A lot of these companies will be prosumer companies, but there will be several business application companies as well."

Ben Lerer, managing partner at Lerer Hippeau: "When you get the cost of compute going down as quickly as it has, and the number of options in terms of foundational models growing as it has, you end up with a really interesting time for the application layer to thrive. If you're a startup, you can go with the flavor of the month — not just a ChatGPT wrapper, or a Claude wrapper, or a Gemini wrapper, or you name it — but some combination of all of them to optimize functionality, results, and the cost of those results."

Sofia Dolfe, partner at Index Ventures: "2025 is the year we will see the IPO market opening back up. There are already signs that this is on the horizon: we're seeing gradual recovery, rates have started to come down, and there are many later-stage companies with the financial profiles to go public."

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Two kinds of companies will go public as the IPO window opens back up next year. First, the truly great businesses that are really scaled and have forecastable growth and would've gone public earlier if the IPO market was more favorable, and second, companies that entered into structured financings with dirtier terms that need to go public for timing reasons."

Nima Wedlake, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "The IPO market will remain closed for most tech companies, with a high bar for entry — $300 million-plus ARR, fast growth, and cash-flow breakeven or better."

Nihal Mehta, general partner at Eniac: "Guidance on what the regulations could be for crypto and AI would encourage founders to build productively within those areas."

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Ventures: "The new administration is crypto-friendly, bringing with it an expected acceleration of crypto-based business models (especially those using stablecoins). I predict we'll have another crypto mania in 2025."

Wesley Chan, cofounder and managing partner at FPV Ventures: "In 2025, I predict a lot of contraction for VCs, except for top funds. We're still in a downturn. Some firms shut down, a lot of firms are not doing new deals, and you will see a lot of junior-mid level employees leave."

Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "The 'sexiest' deals will continue to raise at sky-high valuations, but for the rest of the pack, companies will need to show very specific metrics to command a strong valuation. There will be a great bifurcation into the 'haves' and the 'have-nots.'"

Don Butler, managing director at Thomvest Ventures: "Startup shutdowns will increase, particularly at the seed stage, as companies run out of cash. This will influence valuations, with investors likely focusing on startups that have shown resilience or achieved meaningful milestones."

Matt Murphy, partner at Menlo Ventures: "Valuations will rise as growth rates and market multiples recover, but many companies still might not grow back into their ZIRP valuations. People are over that and won't let it get in the way of pursuing opportunity. Valuations for GenAI companies will continue to be outliers based on any historical metrics."

Brian Walsh, head of Wind Ventures: "2025 will be the year that we enter the age of 'robo taxis' with, first, Waymo now well along its adoption S-curve in San Francisco and expanding quickly, and, second, Tesla favorably positioned with quickly maturing best-in-class autonomy technology (no human in the loop) and an existing large fleet to scale it."

Kasper Sage, managing partner at BMW i Ventures: "Autonomous fleet deployments will gain traction in controlled, high-density environments such as for applications like campus environments and logistics for heavy industries."

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "With the change of administration, I expect the return of mega M&A deals. We are going to see a 'WhatsApp' like $20 billion-plus M&A outcome for a leading AI company."

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "Big Tech will be back at the M&A table with a new administration and regulatory regime in place. They've been quieter in recent times but should be chomping at the bit to capitalize on what is still a buyer's market."

Sasha McKenzie and Van Jones, both deal leads at Wellington Access Ventures at Wellington Management: "The concept of letter rounds in VC is becoming more amorphous. We're seeing $30 million and $100 million seed rounds, raising questions about what seed even means anymore. The model is shifting towards evaluating how quickly founders can run and how disciplined they are with results, rather than hitting historically stated milestones (e.g., $1 million in revenue to raise a Series A). There will be more nuance in how VCs evaluate progress, focusing more on the operator and their ability to balance vision with execution, based on the capital they have."

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Chatbots are overhyped. Agents are under-hyped. Enterprises will move beyond the low-hanging fruit of 'GPT-wrappers' to deploy digital workers that can reason and take action to make a real business impact."

Praveen Akkiraju, managing director at Insight Partners: "If 2024 was the year of LLMs, we believe 2025 will be the year of agentic AI — where highly capable state-of-the-art reasoning LLMs are combined with orchestration frameworks like memory, tool calling, and user-in-the-loop processes to build AI agents that can address progressively complex business workflows."

Seema Amble, partner at Andreessen Horowitz: "In the short term, human workers will be the reviewer in the loop; in the future, as trust is established over time, I expect many data-derived actions will shift toward being entirely a set of narrowly defined task-driven agents."

S. Somasegar, managing director at Madrona: "The world where we each have a digital assistant that works with a collection of AI agents is probably five to ten years out. But having AI agents that can do specific tasks really, really well is happening sooner and I think we will see a ton of progress on this in 2025."

Ravi Viswanathan, founder and managing partner at NewView Capital: "The venture secondaries market will continue to be an important source of liquidity — a trend we think is here to stay due to structural dynamics of the venture asset class."

Simon Wu, partner at Cathay Innovation: "The size of tender offers has grown from millions to billions as the desire to own top-performing names by mutual funds and VCs increases, thus allowing some of the best names to stay private longer. Tenders are likely to get bigger to a selective group of companies in tandem with a more active IPO market next year."

Molly Alter, partner at Northzone: "Vertical SaaS will become more highly valued than ever, due to the increasing difficulty of differentiating a product in horizontal categories."

Cathy Gao, partner at Sapphire Ventures: "Vertical software will evolve rapidly as AI moves to the agentic phase, enabling end-to-end automation of complex, industry-specific workflows that were once beyond the reach of software. By pairing deep domain expertise with intelligent automation, vertical AI will unlock new use cases, deliver outsized ROI, and become table stakes for staying competitive."

Alexa von Tobel, managing partner at Inspired Capital: "Given the new political climate, we, of course, expect to see less regulation across the board. I think we'll see acceleration in a few core categories, including fintech."

Marlon Nichols, managing partner at MaC Venture Capital: "Fintech is an area I'm excited to invest in, particularly fintech startups leveraging AI to create transformative personal finance tools."

Sydney Thomas, general partner at Symphonic Capital: "We are watching the regulatory environment towards fintech ease which has enabled massive speculation on what asset class will win. … This also means, many startups will be required to regulate themselves, which isn't always an easy thing to do."

Claire Yun, investor at Piva Capital: "Generative AI will continue to accelerate and supercharge robotics; simultaneously, we will see a choke point in human labor as an aging domestic workforce and protectionist policies create a sharp supply and demand imbalance. The result will be a colorful Cambrian explosion of robots as they step in to fill this gap."

Bob Ma, partner at Wind Ventures: "Urban areas will have fleets of robots on sidewalks, while drones will manage suburban and rural deliveries. Enhanced speed, cost-efficiency, and sustainability will redefine retail and e-commerce, with regulations supporting wider adoption and innovation."

Yuri Lee, partner at IVP: "As AI advances enable robots to move from structured, repetitive tasks to more complex and dynamic real-world applications, we'll see rapid progress in robotic perception, manipulation, and decision-making capabilities."

Tasneem Dohadwala, partner at Excelestar Ventures: "Small language domain-specific models are starting to show more value. Instead of using vast swaths of the internet to train large models, these smaller models can be trained on specific datasets, such as medical journals, newspapers, or email collections. As a result, they are highly tailored and more accurate in reflecting a user's particular constraints and voice.

Michael Yang, senior managing partner at Omers: "If 2024 was the year of the LLMs, 2025 will be the year of small language models (SLMs) and proprietary data sets spawning the next generation of enterprise SaaS applications. Companies have realized that data in their midst can be harnessed in new and better ways than the 'structured workflow apps' of old and by leveraging targeted SLMs, they can do work differently, more efficiently."

Brad Bernstein, managing partner at FTB Capital: "Despite the IPO market showing better performance in Q3'24 with proceeds already surpassing 2023 totals, structural issues like regulatory burdens and governance challenges still pose obstacles for small and mid-cap companies. Private equity markets are stepping in to fill the gap, with growth equity deals comprising a larger share of activity and providing opportunities for startups in high-growth sectors like insurtech and healthcare tech."

Jai Das, president and partner at Sapphire Partners: "With the new administration, I predict we will see an uptick in exits, and much more tech M&A activity. We'll also see PE firms buying up a lot of companies once boards and management teams realize these businesses won't be able to grow at 30% at scale and ultimately, IPO."

Aaron Jacobson, partner at NEA: "Open-source foundation models will close the gap with the leading proprietary models. On top of this we will see a significant shift away from pre-training models from scratch to fine tuning OSS models and distilling them to smaller models for faster performance."

Mo Jomaa, partner at CapitalG: "I predict that in 2025 we will continue to see open source technologies consume the infrastructure layer in software. We have seen this trend play out in several categories already, including data and analytics (which led to our investment in Databricks) and observability (which drove our investment in Grafana). Enterprises will continue to adopt open source because it helps them save money, avoid vendor lock-in, and shape the product roadmaps of the technologies that they procure."

Andrew Schoen, partner at NEA: "We will see a surge of investment into technologies critical to restarting the US industrial base and enhancing national security. A record number of deals and dollars will go into AI, automation, cybersecurity, and frontier technology serving manufacturing, supply chain, and defense markets."

Jake Seid, general partner at Ballistic Ventures: "Over the next 18 months, we're going to see a lot more cybersecurity exits. While this may include an uptick in M&A activity, I expect we'll see cybersecurity companies go public in 2025 and in the first half of 2026 given how large the market for cyber products has become."

Samir Kumar, general partner at Touring Capital: "We should expect a lot less regulatory headwinds in 2025 for AI given David Sacks will be the AI and crypto czar for the new administration. This is likely to even result in the repeal of President Biden's executive order on AI."

Francesco Ricciuti, associate at Runa Capital: "In the US, Trump is bringing prominent people from the startup and VC world in the government, and I wouldn't be surprised if the regulatory landscape will evolve towards entrepreneurship and technology."

In the first week of his first term, Trump signed an executive order restricting travel from seven countries with large Muslim populations, virtually blocking immigration from those nations. It also prevented professionals from traveling out of the country for work or personal reasons because they feared they would be unable to return.

In a September speech prior to the election, Trump said he would reinstate his "famous travel ban" and expand it to prevent refugees from Gaza from entering the country.

The last travel ban sparked outcries from tech firms that rely on foreigners with special expertise to fill their ranks and help shape their technologies. Hundreds of executives and employees such as Sam Altman and Sergey Brin converged on San Francisco International Airport in protest, while Box CEO Aaron Levie and the founders of Lyft pledged their support to the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit seeking to stop the order.

The travel ban faced a series of challenges in the lower courts and didn't take full effect until the Supreme Court upheld the order more than a year after Trump signed it.

"I think its possible that Trump may attempt to impose travel bans from certain countries just as he did when he initially tried to implement travel restrictions," said Jason Finkelman, who's based in Austin. "While I think travel bans will likely face challenges in the courts it may lead to issues of US employers being restricted from hiring and retaining the foreign talent they need for their operations."

Elizabeth Goss, who runs her own law practice in Boston, and Justin Parsons, a partner at Erickson Immigration Group's office in Arlington, Virginia, said they believed a travel ban 2.0 would affect different countries this time around, based on this administration's priorities.

"The wildcard for me," said Parsons, "is what happens to China." The president-elect has vowed to enact higher tariffs on Chinese goods, in an effort to hobble the world's second-largest economy. Parsons has asked himself if Trump would ban travel from China to further these efforts.

The tech sector is the biggest beneficiary of the H-1B visa, which allows employers to fill specialty roles with highly educated foreign workers. Last year, more than half of these visas went to workers in computer-related roles, according to data from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

During Trump's first term, government data shows that denial rates for new employees and requests for further evidence of eligibility surged. In 2020, the Trump administration temporarily paused the issuance of new green cards and many work visa types, arguing that this would protect American jobs during a pandemic decline in employment.

The Biden administration has moved to reverse some of these policies and facilitate the processing of work-related visas. In December, the White House published new regulations that allow the immigration agency to process applications more quickly for most individuals who had previously been approved for an H-1B visa.

Jason Finkelman said the new rules "give predictability to employers and foreign nationals on the extensions of their visa petitions when there has been no change in the job duties or the employer." He added that it's plausible Trump can withdraw the regulations once he takes office, however.

Elizabeth Goss offered a more optimistic outlook. She suggested that if Elon Musk has Trump's ear, he might be able to persuade the president to leave the program untouched or even expand the number of visas issued, though such a move hasn't been made since President Bill Clinton raised the limit at the top of the dot-com bubble.

Historically, Canadians have had access to temporary work visa types, the L-1 and the TN, which allowed them to move across the border with less friction. However, according to Justin Parsons, they could face new headwinds under Trump.

Tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have relied heavily on the L-1 visa to transfer an executive or manager from one of their foreign offices to one of their domestic offices. Canadians have been able to apply for this visa at an international airport or border station without having to file a petition with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, a far more cumbersome process.

In 2017, under the Trump administration, some border agents began refusing to process or renew work visas for Canadians already working in the country, Parsons said. The border agents would challenge their eligibility over what Parsons described as arbitrary reasons, or direct them to the immigration agency. This delayed workers who were traveling home from returning.

At the time, Parsons also observed Canadian clients on the TN visa — a temporary work visa for Canadians and Mexicans created under the North American Free Trade Agreement — come under increased scrutiny at the border.

Parsons expressed concern for Canadians that the probing measures might be reintroduced and potentially intensified under Trump's second term.

Over nearly a decade at Insight, Aronovitz has risen from analyst to principal, helping lead investments in Own Company, which Salesforce acquired, and Run:ai, which Nvidia bought. He looks for high-growth B2B SaaS companies in cybersecurity, infrastructure software, and vertical AI. Investments typically span Series A to Series D, with check sizes ranging from $5 million to $500 million.

In 2019, Aronovitz helped open the firm's office in Tel Aviv, Israel, where he lives with his family.

"I draw on years of software investing and pattern recognition to help founders navigate the challenges of scaling internationally," he said.

Aylward joined Accel in 2022. Since then, she has established herself as a go-to early-stage, open-source investor, continuing a firm tradition of early investments in companies like Cloudera, Sentry, and Vercel. She led Accel's seed investments in competitive deals, including VoidZero, founded and led by Evan You, the creator of widely adopted projects in the JavaScript ecosystem, and Astral, a startup building developer tools for the Python ecosystem.

This fall, she also helped organize the first CUDA Mode Hackathon alongside Nvidia and PyTorch, an open-source deep learning framework, attended by hundreds of developers.

Before Accel, Aylward worked at Costanoa Ventures, an early-stage enterprise fund, and was a software engineer at Pinterest, joining through the acquisition of the Accel-backed company URX.

Climate tech investor Barber advises founders to "go deep" on a topic. He's done that himself as a venture investor at Emerson Collective, where he focuses on backing companies that use technology to break down barriers to a clean economy.

Specifically, he focuses on the hardware solutions needed to decarbonize the economy, such as nuclear fusion, energy storage, and other physical solutions in the energy, industrial, and transportation sectors. This year, Barber helped the firm invest in several clean energy startups, including Antora Energy, Xcimer Energy, and Zap Energy.

Before joining Emerson Collective, Barber completed his graduate program in Mechanical Engineering at MIT's Plasma Science and Fusion Center (PSFC) where he specialized in studying nuclear fusion technology. He also co-founded Commons, a carbon-tech start-up, and advises companies on corporate climate strategy.

Basta was promoted to Vice President at Scale Venture Partners, where she focuses on AI infrastructure and developer tools. This past year, she sourced Scale's investments in Galileo, Cortex, Lumos, and QA Wolf. Scale led a $45 million Series B round in generative AI security and monitoring startup Galileo.

Basta is part of a growing number of technically trained VCs with deep expertise in AI and machine learning. Before Scale, Maggie worked as an ML engineer at QuantCo, building AI technology for algorithmic pricing and fraud detection. Her prior academic research focused on Deep Learning.

Basta, formerly a Harvard collegiate soccer player, has authored several key pieces on building and investing in AI infrastructure.

Berenberg has made herself a staple of the New York City tech scene by organizing regular community events, including parties at NY Tech Week and her series of tech breakfasts.

"Venture is one of those rare careers you can start before getting the job," she said. "Build your network, explore your city's startup scene, meet founders, and practice evaluating live deals."

A former product manager, Berenberg joined Bloomberg Beta in 2022 and focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage investments in the future of workspace. Her portfolio includes the lawyer time-tracking platform Ajax and the community-hiring platform Twill. Berenberg earned her undergraduate degree from New York University's Stern School of Business.

Blumberg joined the venture capital world in 2021, and she's since made a big impact on M13's portfolio. As a principal at the early-stage tech-focused firm, she helps lead M13's AI strategy and has sourced or led five of its most competitive AI investments in the past year, including its investments in Norm AI's $11 million seed round, led by Coatue, and RadiantGraph's $11 million Series A, led by M13.

She currently supports 11 of the firm's portfolio companies and sits on the boards of the freelance fintech startup WorkMade and the AI sales platform Lantern.

Blumberg previously worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. After leaving banking, she worked on Mike Bloomberg's 2020 presidential campaign and consulted for political media startups before joining M13. Her recent investments have focused on AI applications for the future of work and healthcare.

Bonakdarpour shapes healthcare strategy as a partner at the Columbus, Ohio-based Drive Capital. This year, she's invested in early-stage startups bringing AI to healthcare, including Droxi AI and Clarence Health. She also sits on the board of the insurtech startup Sidecar Health, which raised a $165 million Series D round in June.

She's supported portfolio companies to successful exits even as M&A has lagged, including the Japanese food producer Ajinomoto's acquisition of Forge Biologics, a biotech startup she helped incubate, for $620 million at the end of 2023.

Before becoming an investor, Bonakdarpour led commercial partnerships at the diabetes company Livongo and held analyst roles at 7wire Ventures and JPMorgan.

Chandramouli first saw the limitations of a healthcare system growing up in South India, where his grandfather still runs a small clinic for patients who can't afford to go to the hospital or seek specialty care. Now, at Oak, he backs founders building for underserved patients who can't advocate themselves.

Chandramouli joined Oak in 2014 as one of the firm's earliest employees. He's since worked on 35 of Oak's 58 healthcare investments to date, from new company incubations to growth-stage deals. He has largely focused on investments in value-based care enablement, with a recent eye for startups using AI in healthcare.

Chandramouli helped incubate the generative AI startup Trovo Health, which emerged from stealth in April with $15 million in seed funding led by Oak. He also sits on the boards of startups including Trovo Health, the virtual-reality surgery company Osso VR, and the healthcare training platform Stepful.

Chao brings a scientific background to her role investing in life-sciences startups at GV. After finishing her MBA at Harvard Business School, Chao completed her doctorate in bioinformatics at Harvard, during which she worked in a cancer immunology lab at the Broad Insitute of MIT and Harvard. Collaborating with leading scientists there sharpened her eye for evaluating the science and market viability of GV's biotech investments.

Chao joined GV as a principal in 2021, and the firm promoted her to partner in January. She's worked on deals like GV's bets on the obesity biotech Metsera, the immunology startup Santa Ana Bio, and several companies still in stealth. Before securing her graduate degrees, Chao spent three years at Goldman Sachs as a private-equity analyst.

Chu is one of the investors leading Khosla's charge into AI. His focus on machine learning and its impact on enterprise infrastructure, applications, and developer tools has led the firm to make investments in high-potential startups such as Sakana, a research lab building a foundation model based on nature-inspired intelligence, and Loft Labs, a startup that virtualizes Kubernetes clusters that raised $24 million in funding in April.

Chu began his career as an engineer at Palantir and founded and sold a software-testing company, Koality, to Docker, where he ran Docker's enterprise group. More recently, he spent time at Opendoor, leading engineering for core machine learning, and at Facebook, overseeing engineering teams in both virtual reality and machine learning.

Cole recently wrapped up her time at Bain Capital Ventures, where she wrote checks for the clothing resale infrastructure startup Archive, the inventory-management platform Cofactr, and Arc, which is a digital bank for SaaS startups. Based in New York, she's focused on application software with a focus on industrials and vertical Saas.

Prior to her time at BCV, Cole was an associate at WeWork's creative fund and completed a stint in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. When it comes to founders, she says that the most important quality she looks for is earned insight.

"Whether that is domain expertise from years of working in the industry or simply becoming self-taught in a space where the founder is passionate, having a strong industry perspective is critical for building a future-facing company," she said.

Although having only been at Menlo Ventures for less than a year, Das has already made his mark at the firm for his AI investing prowess. Das, who was previously on the founding team of hot AI search startup Glean, has helped launch the $100 million Anthology Fund in partnership with Anthropic (Menlo invested in the AI giant's $450 million series C round in 2023).

Deedy is one of only three team members (others include partners Matt Murray and Tim Tully) responsible for making investments out of the fund. Having held technical roles at Facebook and Google Previously, Das is also involved with the firm's investment in Pinecone and serves as an advisor to a number of AI startups including Perplexity.

Das is also a prolific contributor to AI and immigration thought leadership and has amassed over 100,000 followers on social media platform X.

On what he looks for in a founder: "Consistency. Focus is one of the most fleeting qualities in today's day and age. We're all distracted by the shiny new thing. Whether it comes from obsession, discipline or simply drive, being consistent is essential. A successful startup takes 7-10 years — that's a longer duration than most people have done anything."

Detweiler found his way into venture by accident, rejecting roles in physics research and Wall Street trading and working at Silicon Valley Bank. In 2021, Detweiler bet big on AI investing, joining AI-focused fund Zetta Venture Partners. A year later, he joined Felicis with the intention of scaling out the firm's AI portfolio. Over the past few years, Detweiler has helped deploy around $100 million into 8 AI startups.

Detweiler, a physics major and Minecraft lover, has made several early bets on AI and machine learning startups, backing Shield AI. and Flower Labs. He also led Felicis' investment in Skild AI, a company building a foundation model for robotics. Shield AI was last valued at $2.7 billion, and Skild AI was last valued at $1.5 billion.

On what he looks for in a founder: "humility, grit/resilience, clear/secret narrative, talent magnet, fast learner/updates priors, high energy/rate of execution, extraordinary background/track record, and bonus points for expanding the scope of my imagination."

Dong joined Leadout as a principal in 2022. Since joining the firm, which focuses on early-stage startups and helping companies find "founder-market fit," Dong has sourced seven investments, including Creatify, which makes video advertisements with AI, and the food-service sales platform First Bite.

Dong considers himself a generalist investor, though he says he's recently been focusing on the AI app layer. The University of California at Berkeley graduate has made over a dozen angel investments and completed stints at companies including Rippling and Laika. He said the latter experience had been crucial to his success on the VC side of things.

"Be more intentional about developing an investor mindset even before stepping into a full-time investor role, whether it's how you allocate your time, energy, resources, or relationships," he said. "Many skills will likely transfer when allocating capital if you excel at that."

At Salesforce Ventures, Fiegel manages investments for the firm's Slack Fund, which targets early-stage companies creating software and infrastructure meant to power the future of work. Since joining in 2022, Fiegel has helped define the fund's early-stage strategy and sourced and led investments such as Ensemble, a company dedicated to lowering barriers to state-of-the-art machine learning, and Tribble, which automates the "request for proposal" process.

Before she became an investor, Fiegel spent over three years leading product and go-to-market strategy at Quip, a horizontal productivity suite that Salesforce acquired in 2016.

Outside work, she hosts a recurring dinner series for female founders and operators — an effort she hopes to grow and formalize in the new year.

The Austin-based Garcia has been with Amplo for six years, starting out as an associate in 2018 and rising through the ranks before being promoted to partner in 2023. The fund focuses on seed and Series A investing, and Garcia considers himself a generalist investor, though he says he tends to gravitate toward the B2B SaaS, telecom, and legaltech sectors.

His investments include the legal-tech startup Steno, the AI-powered product-management software Axion Ray, and the digital network procurement startup Lightyear.

For Garcia, who graduated from the University of Texas at Austin as well as Harvard Law School, it's important to him that startup founders are experts in their chosen fields.

"I like to ask myself, 'If there was a graduate-level class on what this company does, could this CEO be a professor on it?'" he said.

Gong has an unusually long résumé, especially for someone so young — product roles at Meta and Microsoft, an investor at Bain Capital Ventures, founder of her own video startup, and White House Presidential Innovation Fellow. She added another title to her résumé this year, joining Menlo as a principal. There, she focuses on pre-seed to Series C startups trying to revolutionize how people live, work, and play.

Gong prides herself on her hustle.

"I love breaking down doors for founders," she said. "Having been a founder myself I know how hard it is, and now as a VC my job is to make their job easier."

Since joining Foundation in May 2023, Gupta has already made five seed-stage investments in the AI space, including the sales engineering company DocketAI. Based in San Francisco, Gupta previously completed a stint at the investment-banking firm RBC after graduating from Georgia Institute of Technology.

When it comes to finding success in the world of VC, Gupta said that it's important to find and trust your gut instinct.

"In this business, value for investors means sending relevant deals to the right people, and especially in early-stage investing it's more art than science," she said. "So, it's important to demonstrate you have the capability to identify potential breakthrough people and companies."

Itani began his career at LinkedIn before starting a gaming research and advisory firm. In 2021, he joined Forerunner, which leads seed, Series A, and Series B rounds for consumer startups. Companies Itani works with include Fay Nutrition, which provides insurance-covered dietitians, and Feed, a retailer of healthcare supplements.

"I'd say my superpower has been identifying and engaging in markets that are on the precipice of change," Itani said. "I'm someone who can support our portfolio in any task no matter how big or small, unblocking them, brainstorming alongside them, and getting them in front of people they need to meet."

As a partner at Wing, Jaipuria leads seed and Series A funding rounds in AI-powered applications and infrastructure. Since joining the firm in April 2022, Jaipuria has written checks for the AI social-media ad platform Sesame Labs and the time-tracking legaltech Billables.

Jaipuria, who is based in New York, says aspiring investors should fake it before they make it.

"Be in the flow — help founders with advice, connect them to investors, develop perspectives on sectors and share them online," he said. "You can practice most parts of the job without actually being in the job yet."

Prior to joining Wing, Jaipuria held roles across Big Tech, including product lead at Instagram, product manager at Facebook, and forward-deployed engineer at Palantir. He also spent time as a consultant at McKinsey. Jaipuria earned his undergraduate degree from Columbia University and also graduated from Harvard Business School.

Johnson, based in New York, has been investing at Primary since 2023, and his focus areas include healthcare, fintech, and vertical SaaS. He's made bets on the AI construction startup Bobyard and the fund-management platform Maybern, in addition to a stealth healthtech company.

For Johnson, who graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in computer science focusing on AI, an important part of VC investing is identifying your strengths and building them into networking.

"VC is all about sharing your grand vision and then executing against the plan," he said. "A question I constantly ask myself as an investor is, 'Why would an incredible founder want to take a call with me when they have other investors knocking at their door?' If you can clearly answer that, doors will open."

After working as an engineer at SpaceX, Jones joined AlleyCorp in 2023 to invest in robotics, aerospace, advanced manufacturing, and energy transition technologies at the pre-seed through Series A levels.

"I've found that one of the most important values I'm able to bring to founders is a thorough understanding of deep tech, specifically its scalability throughout industries," Jones said. "The transition stage from concept to commercialization is notoriously challenging, and so that is where there can often be the most need from a founder's perspective."

After starting her career as a banker at Goldman Sachs and working in finance at Hopin, Kuo joined IVP in 2022. She has worked with two of the hottest startups of 2024, Perplexity and Glean. At IVP, Kuo focuses on AI applications, vertical software, and consumer platforms with check sizes ranging from $10 million to $50 million.

"My time at a startup — joining what was a lean finance team during a pivotal moment in the company's growth trajectory — gave me valuable insight into sustaining hypergrowth and, more importantly, tremendous empathy for founders and their teams," Kuo said. "That experience, combined with my background in finance, honed at Goldman Sachs, enriched my understanding of scaling."

Lalendran, Moxxie's newest recruit, has designed and deployed computer vision and robotics systems across land, air, and sea. He worked on drones for the Air Force, shipped 3D vision software for Apple's mapping and self-driving-car projects, and led a team of engineers to scale the world's largest private-owned network of ocean sensors at Sofar Ocean.

In his latest role, Lalendran lends founders his operating expertise — having gone from napkin sketches to scaled deployment many times over — and his technical and commercial network. He specializes in regulated industries, whether manufacturing and mining or maritime and medicine.

Before Moxxie, Lalendran cut angel checks into Milu Health, a healthcare startup that raised a seed round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz, and Driver, a startup seeking to take the slog out of technical writing and recently announced $8 million in funding in a round led by GV.

IVP promoted Lee to partner in July, two years after she joined the firm from Morgan Stanley, where she worked on investment-banking deals like Affirm's and SentinelOne's 2021 IPOs. She's sourced and supported some of IVP's hottest deals this year, like its February investment in the AI-powered medical scribing startup Abridge's $150 million Series C. (The Information reported in October that Abridge was raising a fresh $250 million round at a $2.5 billion pre-money valuation, with IVP set to co-lead the deal alongside the tech investor Elad Gil.)

Lee makes investments across tech and healthcare. She serves on the board of the healthcare staffing startup Clipboard Health and helped IVP secure its investment in the hybrid care provider Accompany Health, which launched in January with a $56 million Series A. She also supports some of IVP's highest-value tech bets, including Discord; she cohosted Discord's B2B product launch event at the Game Developers Conference in March.

Beyond VC, Lee is an avid player and creator of video games — she developed the online multiplayer game "Arena of Kings," released in 2021. She was ranked in the top 1% of "League of Legends" players in the US for multiple years. She's lived in five countries, including South Korea, where she was born, Hungary, where she grew up, and now the United States.

Lehman rejoined Sapphire in 2022 after getting an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. She focuses on generative-AI startups at all layers, from infrastructure to application to large language models.

"As a member of the LGBTQIA+ community, I believe I'm transforming the industry while performing at the highest levels in an ecosystem across which people like me are not widely represented," Lehman said. "The founders I work with know that they are getting my honest take no matter what the context and that I am driven, hungry, and dedicated to working tirelessly towards their success."

Lindsey Li, who joined Bessemer Venture Partners in 2019 as an analyst, has sourced more than seven investments for the firm, including AI and software startups Seam AI and Rundoo.

This year, Li, who makes early-stage bets on startups across gaming and consumer, developer platforms, and crypto, was promoted to Vice President at Bessemer in 2024. She also spearheaded a study focused on AI's effect on developer tasks and contributed to Bessemer's annual State of the Cloud report.

Internally at Bessemer, she created and led the firm's Steel DAO initiative, which developed a platform for deal sourcing for crypto and web3. The DAO evaluated over 300 companies and resulted in four early-stage startups funded by Bessemer.

On what Li looks for in a founder: "Clarity of thought and vision. I find this is often predictive of other very important qualities, including being able to see the present clearly (i.e., hard-headed about the facts) and communicate in granular detail the steps between now and the future they envision."

Malik was promoted from principal to partner at Dell Technologies' VC arm. She invests in AI, machine learning, cloud infrastructure, and deep tech. Her current investments include RunPod, Secuvy, SiLC, TheLoops, and several companies still in stealth mode. Malik sourced the seed investment in AI startup RunPod from an engineering subreddit; the startup raised $20 million from Dell and Intel Capital earlier this year.

A deeply technical software engineer, Malik was previously an investor with Samsung Catalyst Fund, Samsung's deep technology venture fund. Prior to becoming an investor, she worked as a software engineer and product manager at Microsoft and Amazon.

Malik's advice for any aspiring VCs: "Learn the fine balance between being analytical and data-driven and 'suspending disbelief' at the right time when you believe you may have come across a potential outlier. There are a million reasons to say no to any investment. Finding that one reason to say 'yes' takes being able to believe in a big vision that may be supported by very little data."

Meyers says that in VC, it's crucial to do your homework.

"Coming into conversations informed, with interesting insights that can further the thinking of investors that you're interacting with, can demonstrate the type of value you'd bring as a member of their team," she said. "And, everything you learn while breaking in will help you do the job when you get there."

Meyers, who is based in New York, has been at Bain Capital Ventures since September 2022 and was promoted to principal in January 2024. She focuses on the application-software vertical, and her bets include the industrial workplace platform MaintainX, the legal-tech startup EvenUp, and the sales-focused Apollo.

When Flybridge decided to take a big swing on New York's tech ecosystem with a dedicated fund, it named Middleton as the dealmaker in charge. He helped launch and now leads Next Wave NYC, a pre-seed venture fund, wholly owned by Flybridge, that invests in local entrepreneurs using artificial intelligence to build next-gen products.

Middleton is a general partner at Flybridge, having cut his teeth as an angel investor. He built up his network as an early employee at WeWork, where he built and supported a community of thousands of founders in WeWork Labs, the coworking company's take on a startup incubator.

His notable investments include Chief, the professional network for women in executive roles; Jackpocket, a lottery app that DraftKings purchased this year for $750 million; and Arcee.ai, an early-stage developer of small language models that announced two separate funding rounds this year.

Montgomery has boomeranged back to the world of VC: He previously spent eight years at the seed investment firm Mesa Ventures but left in 2020 to be vice president of finance and strategy at the early-childhood edtech startup Lovevery. While at the company, Lovevery closed a $100 million Series C funding round led by TCG, valuing the startup at $800 million.

Montgomery, who's based in Boise, Idaho, and spends time in New York, went back to venture capital in 2023, joining Collaborative Fund as a partner to focus on next-generation consumer startups. He's backed the teen-focused marketing and data startup Cafeteria.

"Showing initiative and the ability to spot potential will set you apart," he said of people looking to get into venture capital. "This could mean helping startups or writing publicly about your ideas. Build a track record of insights that demonstrate how you think about opportunities."

Morales leads Point72 Ventures' defense tech practice, a field he's been passionate about since starting his career as a naval flight officer, wherein he was responsible for operating the weapon systems of fighter aircraft. He served in the Navy for eight years before transitioning into investment banking at Goldman Sachs.

Morales joined Point72 Ventures in 2020 as a vice president and was promoted to partner in April. He opened the firm's first office in Washington, DC, in May to build up Point72's military tech presence. He's led and worked on some hot defense tech deals, including the autonomous-pilot startup Shield AI's $90 million Series C in 2021 — the startup clinched more funding last year at a $2.7 billion valuation — and a 2020 investment into Stoke Space, a reusable-rocket company backed by Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

Morales led the autonomous-driving-tech startup Overland AI's $10 million seed round in May. He's backed several other defense tech startups that are still in stealth this year.

Mason Murray joined NEA as a Senior Associate in 2022 and helped form its AI investment thesis. He's been involved in several recent AI bets, including Glacier, Limitless AI, and Twelve Labs. Earlier this year, Twelve Labs raised $50 million in funding from NEA and Nvidia.

Prior to NEA, Murray worked in investing banking at Bank of America.

As for his advice for any aspiring VCs: "VC is multidisciplinary and there's no single path in. My advice would be to assess your operational strengths, areas of expertise, and unique networks. Your recruiting, sourcing, and network-building strategies will be most effective when tailored to where you can deliver near-term value. When you find your sweet spot, lean into it."

Iconiq Growth had only a handful of healthcare investments when Ramaswami joined the firm in 2018. Over the past seven years, she's helped Iconiq establish a presence in the industry with 15 healthcare bets, sourcing and leading deals such as the firm's investments into Benchling, Devoted Health, and Unite Us.

This year, she sourced and closed Iconiq's investment into the medical device startup AcuityMD's $45 million Series B round, and she now sits on the startup's board of directors. Her 15 startup investments are worth $1.5 billion today.

Beyond the firm, Ramaswami works to improve diversity in venture capital as a cofounder of Neythri.org, a community of South Asian professional women, and a founding limited partner of the Neythri Futures Fund, a fund made up primarily of South Asian investors that's focused on backing startups with underrepresented founders, especially South Asian women. Two of that fund's portfolio companies, Cacheflow and Rupa Health, were acquired this year.

Naren Ramaswamy has been promoted four times over the past two years at Alumni Ventures, moving from associate to now the youngest junior partner at the firm. Ramaswamy helped craft Alumni Ventures' AI thesis and created a data-driven sourcing engine for the form. He sourced and led more than deals across AI, SaaS, and deep tech, including Daydream, Vectara, and Vanilla.

Before his work in Silicon Valley, he was a touring soloist/composer on the Indian bamboo flute under musician Ravi Shankar's school of music. Ramaswamy holds three degrees from Stanford, including bachelor's and master's degrees in engineering and an MBA from Stanford's Graduate School of Business. He also teaches a course at the university on venture capital.

Segall joined Redpoint in 2021, concentrating on SaaS, developer tools, AI, and security startups. He likes to invest in companies early, at either seed or Series A, with checks ranging from $1 million to $30 million.

"I've worked in startups like Palantir, C3.ai, and RelateIQ across engineering, product, and presales and leverage those experiences to help founders on everything from recruiting and interviewing candidates, sourcing key customer leads and helping founders with GTM strategy, and thinking through core strategic initiatives and goal setting/planning," Segall said.

Earlier this year, Sun moved from TSVC to 500 Global, where she focuses on data infrastructure, vertical intelligence applications, and cybersecurity startups. Sun invests in pre-seed to Series A rounds, with check sizes ranging from $150,000 to $5 million.

"What truly excites me is finding highly technical founders who deeply understand their domains and are committed to building ambitious global companies that can reshape their industries," Sun said.

Companies she has backed include d-Matrix, which is developing a digital in-memory computing architecture, and Ridge Security, an AI agent platform for security validation.

Wan has been spearheading Bessemer Venture Partners' early-stage deep tech investments, including in quantum computing, defense tech, and AI and machine learning. Wen has worked closely with the firm's AI and defense companies, including Bastille, Lumachain, and ModelCode.ai, Bastille, a company developing hardware and software to provide wireless intrusion security software to the US government, recently raised a $44 million in Series C funding.

Wan also helped lead Bessemer's investment in defense AI startup DEFCON AI's $44 million seed round this year.

Prior to joining Bessemer, Wan was an investor at In-Q-Tel and Tusk Ventures, investing in companies at the intersection of technology and government. While getting his MBA and law degree at Stanford, Wan was part of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, where he researched and wrote policy reports on artificial intelligence.

Wang joined General Catalyst as a partner in May 2023 to focus on early-stage B2B software and AI investments. In the year and a half since, she's worked on 17 of the VC firm's deals, including General Catalyst's seed investment in Pylon, which raised a $17 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in August.

Before joining General Catalyst, Wang led product growth efforts at the analytics company Amplitude, which now helps her understand the pain points of the enterprise startups she invests in. She's also an angel investor, making bets alongside VC heavy-hitters like Sequoia Capital and Coatue, as well as General Catalyst.

Based out of General Catalyst's San Francisco office, Wang helps cultivate relationships between the firm and founders in the Bay Area, including by working with student organizations at Stanford University to identify top student builders. She recently hosted a speed-dating-style event series meant to help entrepreneurs find cofounders in the community.

Menlo has called Xiao a "driving force" of its investments at the frontier of artificial intelligence. Early last year, he led the diligence process for Anthropic — before it had any revenue and before others saw it as a threat to OpenAI's dominance. His iron grasp on the technicals helped the firm establish a thesis for how enterprises would adopt large language models and allowed it to gain conviction in Anthropic before the opportunity was obvious.

Xiao found further success with an investment in Neon, a serverless-database provider that has since raised from Microsoft and is now seeing rapid adoption from enterprises.

He also led Menlo's thesis work around infrastructure to power the next generation of apps. This led Menlo to lead a $40 million Series B round of funding for Unstructured, a startup that helps enterprises transform unstructured data into formats compatible with large language models.

Before he became an investor, Xiao worked as a consultant at Bain & Company.

Xu is a growth investor at Lightspeed, focusing on enterprise software companies raising Series B rounds and beyond. He typically deploys $50 million to $150 million. Xu splits his time between finding new companies and doubling down on existing investments like Wiz, Glean, Grafana, Verkada, and Anduril.

Xu prides himself on connecting companies to the right people.

"I've been fortunate to build individual relationships with a wide variety of people," Xu said. "I love being able to 'activate' my network and share those relationships with the companies I work with."

Yuan, who goes by "YY," came to VC from particularly unconventional beginnings — as a women international master in chess. She landed that title at age 14 and was the top female player in Canada for seven years, leading her to start a nonprofit during her high-school years called Chess in the Library, which has run more than 30 chess programs at public libraries across Canada.

Now, as a partner at SignalFire, Yuan tries to predict several moves ahead in healthcare. She's helped grow SignalFire's healthcare portfolio to 30 startups, including by co-leading the firm's investments into startups like the AI-powered medical coding company CodaMetrix, which SignalFire first backed in 2023 at the time of its $55 million Series A, and Praia Health, which spun out of the health system Providence to land a $20 million Series A in April. She sits on the boards of Praia Health, the medical data annotation platform Centaur Labs, the medication adherence startup Wellth, and the clinical documentation company Health Note.

Before joining SignalFire in 2019, Yuan spent two years at Blackstone working on the firm's emerging-markets team and then evaluating late-stage and IPO investments. She also cofounded the New York Corporate Chess League, which saw Blackstone players face off with teams from top institutions like Goldman, JPMorgan, and Bank of America Merrill Lynch.

In her three years with Citi Ventures, Zec has executed on nearly a dozen investments — more deals than some investors hope to make in twice the time. This year, she led Citi's investments in Wealth.com, an estate-planning company; Finix, a payment processor taking on Stripe; and Norm AI, a company working to automate regulatory compliance.

Zec has spent her career in venture capital and growth investing and now acts as a critical bridge between founders of fintech and wealth companies and large financial institutions that are target customers. Her efforts help startups win enterprise business and ensure Citi has access to startups whose partnerships keep the bank competitive.

Salesforce Ventures has committed $1 billion to invest in new applications for artificial intelligence, and it's counting on Zhao to surface the best and brightest teams for investment. Since she joined the firm in 2022, Zhao, a principal, has played a pivotal role in leading some of its biggest investments, including Anthropic, Hugging Face, RunwayML, Protect AI, and Cohere.

More recently, Zhao sourced and led the latest round in Together AI, a startup that allows businesses to train and deploy their own large language models or an open-source model, and one of the largest investments Salesforce Ventures has made in the genAI category to date.

Before Salesforce Ventures, Zhao started her investment career as an associate in the private equity group at Blackstone, where she focused on corporate buyouts. Her passion for finding and backing exceptional founders led her to switch to earlier-stage investing.

Zhou's arrival at Accel in March felt more like a homecoming than a fresh start. Before he became an investor, Zhou founded and led a social gaming company, Mayhem, that raised money from Accel. In 2021, Niantic, the maker of "Pokémon Go," acquired his startup for an unknown sum and put Zhou in charge of product for its game platform. He built out new social and community features and, on the side, advised early-stage founders in Accel's portfolio.

This past spring, Zhou led Accel's Series A investment in Decagon, a buzzy startup developing virtual agents for customer support. He chased down the team before his official start date with Accel, and the term sheet was signed during his first week on the job.