Carbide Ventures
Venture capitalPalo Alto · Pre-Seed–Series A · 9 people tracked
Investment thesis
Carbide Ventures makes high-conviction investments at the pre-seed, seed, and Series A stages, focusing on what it calls the 'New Age of Compute.' The firm prefers B2B companies, particularly those selling to large enterprises, and believes advances in artificial intelligence, blockchain, quantum computing, and materials will continue to drive software's expansion. Run by operators who have helped build multiple unicorns and $100M+ ARR businesses, the firm brings functional expertise across go-to-market, product, technology, and finance. It invests globally across North America, Asia, and Europe, and offers particular support for the US-Japan corridor, helping companies with Japan market entry and Japanese companies expanding worldwide.
Source: firm website, verified Aug 11, 2026.
Team · 9 people
from the firm's website & public directories
What they invest in
from 23 of 58 portfolio companiesAI & Machine Learning ×10Enterprise Software ×9Data & Infrastructure ×8SaaS ×8Cloud Computing ×5Marketing Tech ×4Cybersecurity ×2Deep Tech ×2
HQs:United States×8Japan×4United Kingdom×1Singapore×1
Investments · 58 tracked
founders shown can be your intro pathBy year:2024 · 12023 · 12021 · 12015 · 14 dated
Prior team investment (NASDAQ:LASR).
Bloomington, US
Michael Somers(Executive Officer, Director)Nageswar Bijivemula(Executive Officer, Director)
Board seatDan Weirich· per SEC Form D · $2M raise · filed Jul 2024
BrazeAI Decisioning Studio is an AI platform that helps marketers make personalized 1:1 customer decisions by optimizing channel, offer, creative, and timing across hundreds of customer attributes.
AI & Machine LearningMarketing TechBoston, US
George Khachatryan(Executive Officer, Director)Victor Kostyuk(Executive Officer, Director)
BoardMike Ghaffary(Director)
Prior team investment (NYSE:EGHT).
Prior team investment; acquired by Broadcom.
Beetexting is a business texting platform that lets sales, service, operations, recruiting, and marketing teams communicate with contacts over SMS through shared inboxes, automations, and bots.
Enterprise SoftwareSaaSSales Tech
Chronosphere is an observability platform for microservices and containers, offering an end-to-end observability solution and a telemetry pipeline (from the creators of Fluent Bit and Calyptia) to collect, transform, and route telemetry data while controlling cost and complexity.
Cloud ComputingData & InfrastructureDeveloper Tools
Software platform for retail store operations management.
Prior team investment; acquired by IBM.
Platform connecting corporations with volunteer and giving opportunities for CSR.
Chronosphere provides an observability platform for microservices and containers that helps teams detect and fix customer-impacting issues while controlling costs and complexity.
Cloud ComputingData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsPalo Alto, US
MARTIN CHEN MAO(Executive Officer, Director)ROBERT JAMES SKILLINGTON(Executive Officer, Director)
IBM Cloudant is a managed NoSQL database service based on Apache CouchDB, designed for building hyperscale, globally distributed applications with features including encryption, multi-region availability, full-text search, and geospatial indexing.
Cloud ComputingData & InfrastructureEnterprise SoftwareBoston, US
Michael Miller(Founder/Chief Scientist)inAlan Hoffman(Founder/Director of Product)inAdam Kocoloski(Founder/CTO)in
Dyad converts unstructured healthcare data into structured clinical codes (SNOMED, ICD-10, CPT) using its GENIE graph-based AI and clinical knowledge graph, delivering outputs into existing EHRs, applications, and data lakes.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureHealthtech
Engineer recruiting and matching platform using proprietary algorithms.
Live interactive video platform for community engagement and monetization.
Fan and community engagement platform in Japan.
Prior team investment (NASDAQ:IAWK).
LakeFusion provides AI-powered Master Data Management (MDM) software integrated with the Databricks Lakehouse platform, giving businesses a unified platform to manage, integrate, and optimize their data.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise Software
Lazuli provides a product data platform that uses generative AI to collect, organize, and enrich product information for enterprises.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise SoftwareSaaSTokyo, JP
Full-stack customer engagement platform for restaurants, hospitality and events.
Prior team investment; acquired by Avast.
Efficiency meets construction.
Coroyawa is a specialized flooring material designed to reduce fracture and trauma risk for elderly users by combining stable walking comfort with impact absorption during falls.
HardwareHealthtechMedical DevicesNew MaterialsHamamatsu, JP
Nutmeg is a tourism DX platform that helps tourism operators—such as theme parks, attractions, transport services, and aquariums—increase direct sales through online booking, electronic ticketing, CRM/marketing automation, and fan-building tools.
Marketing TechSaaSTravel & HospitalityBerkeley, JP
Takashi Nakaguchi(Chief Executive Officer and President)Andrew Spencer(Secretary)
Ambient AI hardware products for capturing and utilizing intelligence.
QuEra develops neutral-atom quantum computers, building both the quantum hardware and the classical control systems that operate them, along with related software and applications.
Deep TechHardwareQuantum Computing
Nate Gemelke(Co-founder, Chief Technology Strategist)Vladan Vuletić(Co-Founder & Chief Technology Officer)Mikhail Lukin(Co-founder & Chief Scientist)Markus Greiner(Co-founder)Takuya Kitagawa(President)Dean Bogdanovic(SVP Engineering)
Prior team investment (NYSE:RKUS).
Prior team investment; acquired by Keys.
Skill and talent management platform for strategic HR.
Skillnote is a skills management platform that visualizes and analyzes employee skills, licenses, and training plans on a single matrix, and centralizes records for quality standard audits such as ISO 9001 and IATF 16949.
Advanced ManufacturingHR TechSaaS
Prior team investment; acquired by GE.
SOUNDRAW is an AI music generator that creates royalty-free, legally licensed tracks trained exclusively on in-house produced music.
AI & Machine LearningCreator EconomyMedia & Entertainment
Springdel builds an enterprise-grade EdgeOps platform (Springmatic) for managing and running interactive edge devices at scale, offering fleet visibility, device and data control, and AI-ready deep-learning insights.
Enterprise SoftwareIoTSaaS
Synacor provides cloud-based identity management (Cloud ID) and enterprise collaboration software (Zimbra email and productivity suite) for media brands, video/OTT/streaming and communications providers, device manufacturers, governments and enterprises.
Cloud ComputingCybersecurityEnterprise SoftwareBuffalo, US
Gary Ginsberg(Director)Jordan Levy(Director)William J. Stuart(Executive Officer)Marwan Fawaz(Director)Andrew Kau(Director)Scott Murphy(Director)
Creative AI enabling beauty brands to build creatives at scale.
Beachside is an AI-based creative production platform ("Creative OS") for producing and managing marketing and brand assets.
AI & Machine LearningMarketing TechSaaS
WALT builds a crew of autonomous data engineering agents that handle ingestion, transformation, analytics, and governance to build and operate an enterprise data platform.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise Software
Customer data platform unifying operations, service, sales and marketing.
Mountain View, US
Kazuki Ota(Executive Officer, Director)Morlo Kurosaki(Director)Hironobu Yoshikawa(Executive Officer, Director)William Tai(Director)
BoardTim Guleri(Director)Andy Vitus(Director)
Twitter client built by Betaworks, acquired by Twitter.
Type Five is a housing company that designs and builds homes using a modular design system paired with software, employing wood frame construction methods.
Construction TechPropTechBerkeley, US
BoardAleksis Bertoni(Director)Tim Thimmaiah(Executive Officer, Director)
Surry Hills, Nsw
Melanie Perkins(Executive Officer, Director)Clifford Obrecht(Executive Officer, Director)
Agentic data platform turning structured data into a reasoning layer for AI workflows.
Prior team investment; acquired by Google.
Prior team investment (NYSE:YUME).
Prior team investment (NASDAQ:ZM).
Rows marked “SEC filing” are inferred from directors named on the company's SEC Form D — public regulatory data, not a portfolio list published by the firm.
Exits · 4
IPOs and acquisitions across the tracked portfolioImpinjNASDAQ: PInLightNASDAQ: LASRCalyptiaacq. by ChronosphereLocation Labsacq. by Avast
Frequently asked questions
- What stage does Carbide Ventures invest at?
- Carbide Ventures invests at the Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A stages.
- What sectors does Carbide Ventures focus on?
- Carbide Ventures focuses on AI & Machine Learning, Crypto & Web3, Data & Infrastructure, Deep Tech, EdTech, Enterprise Software, Fintech, Hardware, Healthtech, IoT, New Materials, Quantum Computing, SaaS.
- Where is Carbide Ventures located?
- Carbide Ventures is headquartered in Palo Alto, US.
Images
Co-investors · 7
Techstars is a startup accelerator and early-stage investor that funds ambitious founders and provides capital, mentorship, and access to a global network of investors, operators, and corporate partners.
Airbus Ventures is a conviction-led venture firm that invests in early-stage companies building critical industrial infrastructure, national security systems, and platforms supporting global commerce and defense.
Foundation Capital is a venture capital firm that invests in companies at their earliest, most formative stages, with a strong belief in the transformative power of design.
Sapphire Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in 2011 that backs technology companies, offering operating support such as executive talent and customer introductions to its portfolio.
Bowery Capital is an early-stage venture firm focused on B2B software companies, providing hands-on go-to-market, talent, and business development support to founders.
Peak XV Partners is a multi-stage venture capital firm partnering with founders across seed, venture, and growth stages, positioning itself as a hands-on partner beyond just capital.
Silverton Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Texas that partners with founders long-term, having backed 75+ portfolio companies with 30+ acquisitions and 4 IPOs.
Firms observed investing alongside Carbide Ventures, from public investor directories. Shared companies are the overlap with Carbide Ventures's recorded portfolio.
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