Venture with Grace

Ray Wu is a seasoned venture capitalist with over 20 years of investing experience across a wide range of industries and geographies. Before joining Alumni Ventures, Ray Wu was a partner and adviser at several global venture funds focusing on AI, Web3, FinTech and SaaS investment opportunities across the U.S. and Asia Pacific. Earlier, he spent more than 10 years in the corporate venture space: He was the managing director of HP’s new business ventures, responsible for startup technology evaluation, new business incubation, VC relationships, and minority investments, and earlier at Cisco Systems, holding several senior positions leading investment, M&A, internal incubation, and global consulting. Previously, Ray Wu was a managing partner of a leading Internet consulting firm working with Fortune 1000 companies across North America. He earned a dual MBA degree from the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University.Topics -

• Evaluating technical defensibility in fast-moving frontier markets
• How corporate venture experience sharpens long-term AI investment judgment
• Corporate VC exits decoded: How Ray Wu drove Allegro to Cisco, Digital Fountain to Qualcomm

#VC #AI #SaaS #Startups #TechInvesting

Tobias Citron serves as Partner at Primary Venture Partners, leading cybersecurity investments and incubating pre-seed startups in AI infra, data tools, and developer platforms like Etched AI, Cake AI, Stanza, and SparkAI (acquired by John Deere), building NYC's seed ecosystem since 2021. A Princeton public policy alum and Wharton MBA, he cut his teeth as founding GM at Prehype's Radicle venture studio, Deloitte strategy consulting, Citi investment banking, and Rough Draft Ventures fellow, driving NYC Founders Fellowship and global deal flow for Primary's builder-first model.Topic -

• Refragmentation of Cybersecurity in the AI Era
• The Anthropic Breach and the Splintering of Cyber Stacks
• Early Signals That Predict Breakout Dev Platforms

#VentureCapital #DeveloperTools #DataInfrastructure #StartupEcosystem #NYCTech

Amir Haleem founded Nova Labs (formerly Helium) in 2013, pioneering the world's largest decentralized wireless network that powers IoT sensors and Helium Mobile—a blockchain-based phone service now integrated with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Google Fi, rewarding node operators with crypto for coverage. Ex-CTO of gaming startup Diversion and original Battlefield 1942 engineer at DICE, the esports champion co-founded esreality.com before pivoting from social gaming with Napster's Shawn Fanning to solve IoT data costs via people-powered hotspots spanning millions of devices globally.Topics -

• Why People-Powered Infrastructure Scales Faster
• Decentralized 5G Wars: Beating Carriers with Crypto Hotspots
• Why IoT Connectivity Was the Trojan Horse

#DecentralizedWireless #CryptoInfrastructure #5G #Blockchain #IoT

Aaron Cannon is the co-founder and CEO of Outset, where he’s leading the development of the world’s first agent-led research platform powered by AI-moderated interviews. He brings over a decade of experience in product strategy and leadership from roles at Tesla, Triplebyte, and Deloitte, with a passion for building tools that bridge design, business, and user research. Aaron studied economics and entrepreneurial leadership at Tufts University and continues to mentor young innovators.Topics -

• AI-Moderated Interviews: Unlocking Deeper Insights at Enterprise Scale
• Replacing Human Moderators Forever through Agentic AI Interviews
• Facilitating 500,000+ Hours of Interviews Across 10,000+ Research Studies

#OutsetAI #AgenticAI #AIResearch #AIInterviews #AIModeration #ResearchTech

Kylan Gibbs is the co-founder & CEO of Inworld AI, the core infrastructure for real-time, multimodal AI applications at global consumer scale.Inworld is a product-focused research lab delivering sub-500ms, high-QPS AI experiences via specialized models and streaming architectures that most teams can’t build in-house.Under Kylan’s leadership, Inworld has launched products including Inworld TTS (ranked #1 on major third-party benchmarks for latency, quality, and cost) and Inworld Runtime, a C++-optimized real-time orchestration and observability platform.Prior to Inworld, Kylan focused on product development at DeepMind (Google) and Bain & Company. Backed by Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, S32, Microsoft M12, CRV, Bitkraft, and others, he is now focused on defining the next AI stack and enabling AI-native products that were previously impossible.Topics:

• Why the next wave of AI must be real-time: latency, QPS, and unit economics at consumer scale

• Inside the real-time AI stack: specialized models, streaming infrastructure, and production-ready orchestration

• Beyond credits: building a durable consumer AI ecosystem through infrastructure and acceleration

Anand Chandrasekaran is the Managing Partner of Celesta. Prior to joining Celesta, Anand Chandrasekaran co-founded and was President of Crescendo, an AI-first contact center business, co-created and backed by General Catalyst (GC). He is a former Partner and Venture Advisor at GC. Earlier in his career he was CPO and a product leader for two decades at Five9, Meta (Messenger), Bharti Airtel, Snapdeal (FreeCharge), and Founder of Aeroprise (acquired by BMC Software). He was recognized as the #1 seed investor focused on the India – U.S. corridor by the HURUN India Report three years in a row from 2022-2024. Anand holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. from PSG College of Technology, India. In 2010, Anand was named Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. In 2017 and 2018, he was named to Fortune's 40 under 40 India list.Topics:

• Why the best AI investors think like product leaders
• How to build truly cross-border teams
• How enterprises decide when AI is “production-ready”

#AI #VentureCapital #EnterpriseAI #ProductLedGrowth #OperatorToInvestor #IndiaUSTech #SeedStage #StartupInvesting #B2BTech #SmartVenture

Nico Laqua is the CEO/CTO and Co-Founder of Corgi (YC S24), the first fully automated AI-native insurance carrier based in San Francisco, aiming to rebuild the $1T+ industry through compute-speed underwriting, claims processing, and modular coverage like D&O, Cyber, General Liability, and innovative AI Liability for tech glitches. Previously, he founded Basket Entertainment, scaling a gaming portfolio to 200M+ monthly active users—reaching 25-50% of teens in Western markets—after serving as founding engineer at Green Mountain Aquaculture with Nobel Laureate Dr. Hamilton Smith. A Columbia neuroscience and computational biology graduate from Lithuanian immigrant roots, Nico pivoted from gaming to insurance post-ChatGPT, acquiring a licensed carrier for $35M and leveraging LLMs for regulatory bare-metal efficiencyEmily Yuan is the Co-Founder and COO of Corgi (YC S24), an AI-powered insurance carrier transforming the industry through fully automated underwriting and claims processing. Based in San Francisco, Emily is a Stanford computer science dropout who began building companies at 20, previously co-founding Picnic and serving as COO of Basket Entertainment, where she helped scale mobile gaming studios to over 200 million monthly players across 100+ titles. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree in Consumer Tech, Emily brings deep expertise in operations, talent-dense team building, and identifying breakout opportunities at the intersection of AI, fintech, and consumer technology.Topics: AI-driven disruption in insurance and automation scalingFull AI Underwriting: Claims Paid in Seconds, Not WeeksAcquiring carriers and automating $1T industry with LLMs#AIforGood #TechInInsurance #TechFounders #YCAlumni #MachineLearning #RegTech

Mohit Aron is the founder of Cohesity and Nutanix and now he’s building Stealth AI startup. He is famous for being the founder of both. Mohit Aron built Cohesity into a multi-billion-dollar data protection unicorn backed by Sequoia, Nvidia, and others after co-founding and scaling Nutanix as CTO to public market leadership with hyper-converged infrastructure that redefined enterprise storage. A Rice University engineering alum and ex-Google File System architect, he pioneered secondary storage innovations tackling "dark data" analytics, DevOps, and resiliency at massive scale, now focusing his serial founder expertise on next-gen AI infrastructure post-Cohesity's 2024 transition where he stepped to founder emeritusTopics:

• Scaling from CTO (Nutanix) to CEO (Cohesity) to Serial Founder (Stealth)
• Sales tactics for infrastructure startups.
• Infrastructure Lessons You Only Learn at $1B+ Scale

#AIWorkloads #DataProtection #TechInnovation #HyperScaleData #Insurtech #DataInnovation #Founders

Joseph Ros is a Partner and General Manager at Entrepreneur First (EF), the pioneering global platform that invests in exceptional individuals before they have an idea or co-founder. Based in San Francisco, Joseph has backed early-stage technology companies across AI, biotech, robotics, hardware, and climate tech in markets including Singapore, India, Europe, and North America. At EF, he leads talent investing and follow-on capital while driving EF’s global pipeline that connects top technical talent from Europe and India to Silicon Valley. Before joining EF, Joseph was a founder and self-taught engineer, building and scaling consumer web products that reached millions of users across industries like gaming, legaltech, and edtech.Topics:

• Talent-first investing: Why backing individuals before ideas produces outlier companies
• How EF evaluates founders at day zero (signal, grit, and technical edge)
• Building global founder pipelines: Europe & India as the next AI power centers

#VentureCapital #TalentInvesting #EarlyStageVC #AIStartups #GlobalFounders

Vignesh Ravikumar is a Partner at Sierra Ventures. Vignesh Ravikumar joined Sierra Ventures in 2013 and focuses on investments in Enterprise SaaS, Vertical SaaS, and Digital Health/Healthcare IT. Vignesh has a background in M&A transactions for enterprise software companies, having worked at AGC Partners, a Boston-based investment bank. Vignesh holds a BS in Management Science (cum laude) and a Minor in Math from UC San Diego. Topics:

• Underwriting AI-heavy SaaS when infra, pricing, and competition shift
• Pricing and packaging playbooks for AI-native SaaS at seed/Series A
• Vertical SaaS 2.0: deep workflow, compound products, and moats

#VentureCapital #EnterpriseSaaS #VerticalSaaS #DigitalHealth #HealthcareIT