We're excited to introduce Laude Ventures, an early-stage firm investing in deeply technical entrepreneurs with research roots. Laude invests early, at the moment of discovery, then helps founders turn their breakthroughs into breakout companies.

Our $150M Fund I includes more than 50 leading computer scientists — one in three of which is a unicorn founder. Laude investors include esteemed academic professors and researchers from top CS programs, research luminaries like Dave Patterson and Jeff Dean, and successful founders like Ion Stoica, Ali Ghodsi, and Aravind Srinivas.

The three of us have worked alongside each other for years to grow world-changing ideas into multi-billion dollar companies. We're also friends who share a vision for what becomes possible when technologists invest in technologists. Laude is a natural evolution of the work Andrew and Andy have done with Computer Science Graduate Ventures, a fund designed to bring returns to top tier computer scientists by investing early in Berkeley PhD founders, and Pete's extensive track record of partnering with technical founders of iconic companies in their nascency. Laude (rhymes with "applaud") builds on these legacies by connecting the highest caliber researcher-founders with the resources, network, and experience necessary to build paradigm-creating companies.

Laude was born out of our shared belief that the world needs more visionaries to go from research lab to launch. We believe that the biggest possible startup outcomes, in both returns and impact, will come from deeply technical founders with research roots. We've had a hand in growing a few of these companies ourselves — like Databricks, VMWare, and Perplexity. We know that it's much easier to learn how to be a founder than to be a visionary. We think that research technologists make the best founders.

We're here to help smart people bring new technology to life. We're not distracted by hype — we know that discovery is even more useful than disruption. It's easy to break things. What's much more difficult, but much more worthwhile, is exploration that leads to a core moment of discovery. Creation. That's what we see our colleagues in the research community pursuing in the labs, and that's what we're helping them launch into the world.

If you're working on something new, cool, nerdy, next, reach out. Let's talk: hello@laude.vc