Zero Prime Ventures
Venture capitalActively deployingSan Francisco · Pre-Seed–Series B · 7 people tracked
Investment thesis
Zero Prime Ventures invests in 'Day Zero' engineer-founders and deeply technical teams building the infrastructure, platforms, and applications behind AI. The firm focuses on the production AI stack — including AI-native infrastructure, data platforms, and technical applications — and supports founders it describes as the most technical minds in AI and data. Its portfolio spans dozens of companies operating deep in the production AI ecosystem, and the firm also convenes a technical community through its AI Council conference.
Source: firm website, verified Aug 3, 2026.
Team · 7 people
from the firm's website
Founder mafia
3 people who came through Zero Prime Ventures went on to found or lead other companies.
What they invest in
from 41 of 50 portfolio companiesAI & Machine Learning ×34Data & Infrastructure ×26Developer Tools ×22Enterprise Software ×18SaaS ×16Cloud Computing ×8Marketing Tech ×3Deep Tech ×2
HQs:United States×25Germany×1United Kingdom×1
Who they back
founder profiles across 25 portfolio companiesFounding team size:solo founder×62 founders×133 founders×54+ founders×1
Where their founders studiedfrom 25 founders with education data
UCL ×3University of Oxford ×3Harvard University ×2KU Leuven ×2Massachusetts Institute of Technology ×2
Where their founders worked beforefrom 31 founders with career history
LinkedIn ×6Uber ×3Asana ×2Facebook ×2Goldman Sachs ×2Google ×2Heap ×2Snap Inc. ×2
Accelerator rootsportfolio companies that came through a program
4 founders hold a PhD · 2 hold an MBA (of 28 with degree data)
Investments · 50 tracked
founders shown can be your intro pathBy year:2026 · 12025 · 22024 · 12023 · 15 dated
Anomalo provides AI-based data quality monitoring that detects anomalies and data issues in large data warehouses and lakehouses.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise Software
Elliot Shmukler(CEO)Jeremy Stanley(Chief Scientist)in
Co-investorsNextView VenturesNorwest Venture PartnersSignalFireSmith Point CapitalVillage GlobalDatabricks Ventures+1 more
Archestra is an open-source, self-hosted platform for building and running AI agents, providing agentic chat, server-side sandboxed agent runtimes, an MCP orchestrator on Kubernetes, permission-aware RAG, LLM/MCP proxies with secret management, security guardrails, and observability.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsEnterprise Software
Co-investorsRLC Ventures20VCTenacity CapitalVisible Ventures
Base64 offers a document intelligence platform that uses multi-modal and generative AI to identify document types, extract fields, and return structured JSON from PDFs, images, and other file formats.
AI & Machine LearningEnterprise SoftwareSaaSNew York City, US
Ozan Bilgen(Founder)
Co-investorsData Community FundLong Journey Ventures
San Francisco, US
Tristan Zajonc(Founder)in
Co-investorsAmplify PartnersIlluminate VenturesInspired CapitalWayfinder VenturesGTMfund
Generative AI search engine for discovering and evaluating novel materials with specific properties for energy and technology applications.
Co-investorsGiant Ventures Global LlpHoxton VenturesKleiner PerkinsLightspeed Venture PartnersNorthzoneTouring Capital
CuspAI develops AI models for materials science and discovery, and leads the AI Materials Foundry initiative that combines accelerated computing infrastructure with chemistry data and materials expertise.
AI & Machine LearningDeep TechNew MaterialsCambridge, GB
Max Welling(Co-Founder)inChad Edwards(Co-Founder & CEO)in
Co-investorsBasis Set VenturesHoxton VenturesKleiner PerkinsLightspeed Venture PartnersNew Enterprise Associates (NEA)Northzone+10 more
Dagster Labs develops Dagster, an open-source data orchestration platform with a commercial cloud offering.
AI & Machine LearningCloud ComputingData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsSan Francisco, US
Nick Schrock(Founder)in
Co-investorsAmplify PartnersCoatue Managementf7 VenturesOSS Capital8VCGeorgian+3 more
DataHub provides a metadata platform and data catalog that enables AI systems and data teams to discover, govern, and understand enterprise data at scale.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise SoftwarePalo Alto, US
Shirshanka Das(Co-founder)inSwaroop Jagadish(Co-founder)inJohn Joyce(Founder)in
Co-investors8VCBessemer Venture PartnersNext Play VenturesSINEWAVE VENTURESWebb Investment NetworkIndex Ventures
Emdash is a free, open-source agentic development environment that runs coding agents like Claude Code and Codex in parallel across isolated Git worktrees, schedules recurring agent runs, and lets developers review diffs, PRs, and CI in one place.
AI & Machine LearningDeveloper ToolsSaaSSan Francisco, US
Co-investorsY Combinator
Freshpaint provides a platform for healthcare marketers to securely connect and activate customer data across marketing channels while maintaining privacy compliance.
Data & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsDigital HealthEnterprise SoftwareHealthtechMarketing TechSaaSSan Francisco, US
Steven Fitzsimmons(Founder)inMichael Malis(Founder)inRay Mina(Chief Executive Officer)inTom Spiegelman(Chief Product & Technology Officer)in
Co-investorsAbstraction CapitalSignalFireThreshold VenturesVibe CapitalY Combinator
Great Expectations provides a data quality and governance platform that enables teams to define, test, and monitor data expectations across their data systems with automation and collaborative tools.
Data & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise Software
Co-investorsCRV (Charles River Ventures)Fourth RealmSAV (Scale Asia Ventures)MedMountain Ventures
Trace is a tool that automates KPI and variance analysis, replacing manual investigations across dashboards and spreadsheets with faster, AI-generated insights.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureSaaS
Co-investorsLayout VenturesLorimer VenturesOceans Ventures
Herald is an AI DevOps/SRE agent that builds a context graph across observability data, codebase, CI/CD, docs, and dependencies to detect anomalies, investigate incidents, and deliver root-cause analyses before alerts fire.
AI & Machine LearningCloud ComputingDeveloper Tools
Co-investorsAfore CapitalBrewer Lane VenturesLightspeed Venture Partners
Hex builds tools for data analysis and visualization, serving data teams, analysts, and organizations that need to work with data.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise SoftwareSaaSSan Francisco, US
Barry McCardel(Founder)inCaitlin Colgrove(Founder)Glen Takahashi(Founder)
Co-investors137 VenturesAmplify PartnersAndreessen HorowitzDash VCLorimer VenturesNext Legacy Partners+9 more
Higgsfield is a platform for creating and generating visual content, including images, videos, and cinematic scenes using AI models.
AI & Machine LearningCreator EconomyMedia & EntertainmentLos Gatos, US
Alex Mashrabov(Founder & CEO)inYerzat Dulat(Executive Officer, Director)inMahi De Silva(Co-founder)in
Co-investorsAccelAlpha Intelligence CapitalAlpha Square GroupAngel Collective Opportunity FundBitkraft Esports VenturesBroadLight Capital+12 more
Hightouch builds a data activation platform that integrates with existing enterprise data infrastructure to enable marketing and business teams to activate customer data at scale.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise SoftwareMarketing TechSan Francisco, US
Kashish Gupta(Founder)inTejas Manohar(Founder)inJoshua Curl(Founder)in
Co-investorsAllison Pickens VenturesAmplify PartnersDash VCDorm RoomEarl Grey CapitalGeodesic Capital+16 more
Observability platform co-founded by Charity Majors.
HoneyHive is an OpenTelemetry-native platform for observability and evaluation of AI agents, letting teams instrument agents on any stack, debug behavior, evaluate live traces, and catch regressions before release.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsNew York City, US
Dhruv Singh(Founder)
Co-investorsAIX VenturesFirestreak Ventures468 Capital
Modal provides a serverless cloud platform designed for data, AI, and machine learning applications, enabling developers to scale from zero to thousands of CPUs or GPUs with simple code.
AI & Machine LearningCloud ComputingDeveloper ToolsNew York, US
Erik BernhardssonAkshat Bubna(Founder)
Co-investorsAmplify PartnersLux CapitalRedpoint VenturesCreandumGeneral CatalystAbstraction Capital+8 more
Kolena provides an AI platform that automates document-heavy workflows—reviewing, validating, generating, and acting on documents such as leases, claims, and financial packages.
AI & Machine LearningEnterprise SoftwareFintechSaaSOakland, US
Mohamed Elgendy(Executive Officer, Director)inGordon Hart(Founder)in
Co-investors11.2 CapitalAIX VenturesLobby CapitalSAV (Scale Asia Ventures)SignalFireBloomberg Beta
LanceDB is an AI-native multimodal lakehouse platform that unifies training data across multiple systems to accelerate model development and dataset creation at scale.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareSan Francisco, US
Chang She(Founder)inLei Xu(Founder)
Co-investorsAngel Collective Opportunity FundCRV (Charles River Ventures)Swift VenturesThe E14 FundTheory VenturesWayfinder Ventures+5 more
Lightning AI, creator of PyTorch Lightning, runs an end-to-end AI development cloud and merged with GPU provider Voltage Park in 2026.
San Francisco, US
William Falcon(Founder)inSaurabh Giri(Executive Officer)Ozan Kaya(Executive Officer, Director)
BoardAmit Mukherjee(Director)Sam Yagan(Director)inCarlos Delatorre(Director)
Co-investorsCisco InvestmentsCoatue ManagementIndex VenturesSherpalo VenturesSV AngelCorazon Capital+3 more
lizzyAI automates large-scale candidate screening, running structured interviews to produce data-backed shortlists for hiring teams and recruitment clients.
AI & Machine LearningHR TechSaaS
Yannis Niebelschuetz(Founder)inShai Meital(Founder)in
Co-investorsAngel InvestHeartfelt CapitalNew Enterprise Associates (NEA)Speedinvest
Mabyduck offers a self-serve platform for evaluating GenAI image models using human feedback and ready-to-use subjective studies, with configurable experiments, real-time analytics, private and public leaderboards, and multilingual pre-screened rater pools.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureSaaS
MotherDuck provides a serverless cloud analytics database built on DuckDB, enabling users to query and understand their data more easily.
Cloud ComputingData & InfrastructureSeattle, US
Jordan Tigani(Co-founder and Chief Duck-Herder)inHannes Mühleisen(Co-founder)Mark Raasveldt(Co-founder)Tino TereshkoRyan Boyd(Founder)in
Co-investorsAmplify PartnersAndreessen HorowitzEastlink Capital PartnersFelicis VenturesFirestreak VenturesKearny Jackson+7 more
Onehouse offers Table Optimizer, a managed service that automatically handles clustering, compaction, and data cleaning to improve performance and reduce cost for data lakehouses.
Cloud ComputingData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareSaaSSunnyvale, US
Vinoth Chandar(Founder (CEO))inGaetan Castelein(Head of Go-To-Market)inKyle Weller(Product Lead)inTiffany Jordan(Talent & Global Business Operations)inNilesh Mahajan(Founding Engineer, Platform Engineering Lead)inRajesh Mahindra(Systems Engineer)in
Co-investorsAdditionCraft VenturesGreylock Partners
Orama builds search and AI infrastructure, offering OramaJS (an open-source search library), Orama Cloud Pro (managed search with AI answers at a flat monthly price), and Orama Zetta (an enterprise platform deployed in a customer's own cloud, on-premises, or dedicated infrastructure).
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsSaaS
Co-investorsSAV (Scale Asia Ventures)
Orb provides billing and revenue infrastructure for software companies, enabling usage-based and hybrid pricing models.
Data & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareFintechSaaSSan Francisco, US
Alvaro Morales(Co-Founder & CEO)inKshitij Grover(Co-Founder & CTO)inJosh Buckler(Head of Sales)Bas de Goei(Head of Marketing)Justin Chuan(Head of Design)
BoardSaam Motamedi(Board Member / Investor Representative (Partner, Greylock))in
Co-investorsAngel Collective Opportunity FundData Community FundESSENCE VCFOG VenturesGreylock PartnersMayfield Fund+6 more
Philolabs builds a verification layer for visual AI, focused on alignment and safety infrastructure for video understanding and generation models.
AI & Machine LearningDeep TechEnterprise SoftwareSan Francisco, US
Pydantic offers an end-to-end AI engineering stack built around its open-source Python library, including Pydantic Validation, Pydantic AI (an agent framework), Pydantic Logfire (AI observability), and Pydantic Evals for testing LLM behavior.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper Tools
Co-investorsSequoia Capital
Readyset is a database scaling platform that sits in front of existing MySQL and PostgreSQL databases to accelerate read performance with sub-millisecond latencies.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsBeverly Hills, US
Alana Renda(Founder)inNatalie Lao(Founder)
Co-investorsAmplify PartnersIndex VenturesThe E14 FundEssence Venture Capital
Rill is an analytics tool that lets users ask open-ended questions in natural language and receive visual, verifiable answers, combining AI-generated insights with user input.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureSaaSSan Francisco, US
Michael Driscoll(Founder)inNishant B(Founder)
Co-investorsDCVC (Data Collective)Sierra VenturesSwift Ventures468 CapitalBloomberg Beta
Herald is an AI SRE (site reliability engineering) agent that builds a context graph across observability data, codebase, CI/CD, docs, and dependencies to detect anomalies, investigate incidents, and deliver root-cause analyses before alerts fire.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper Tools
Co-investorsEssence Venture Capital
Runware provides a single API and inference platform for running AI models across image, video, audio, 3D, vision and LLM tasks, giving developers one endpoint, authentication and billing to switch between open-source and closed-source models.
AI & Machine LearningCloud ComputingDeveloper Tools
Ioana Hreninciuc(Founder)inFlaviu R.(Founder)in
Co-investorsBegin CapitalCoho DeeptechComcast VenturesDawn CapitalA16Z SpeedrunInsight Partners+1 more
Soda automates data quality monitoring to detect and prevent issues before they impact downstream systems.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureEnterprise SoftwareSaaSChicago, US
Maarten Masschelein(Founder)inTom Baeyens(Founder)in
Co-investorsHummingbird VenturesPoint NineSingular
StarTree provides a real-time analytics platform built on Apache Pinot that enables organizations to query petabyte-scale data at speed and cost efficiency.
AI & Machine LearningCloud ComputingData & InfrastructureEnterprise SoftwareMountain View, US
Kishore Gopalakrishna(Executive Officer, Director)inXiang Fu(Founder)in
Co-investorsCRV (Charles River Ventures)Notable CapitalSapphire VenturesBain Capital Ventures
Structured uses AI and computer vision to automatically review architectural and engineering drawing packages, checking for compliance violations, coordination conflicts, and scope gaps across disciplines including architecture, structural, MEP, and civil engineering.
AI & Machine LearningConstruction TechDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwarePropTechNew York City, US
Raymond Zhao(Founder)inIssy Greenslade(Founder)inBrandon Abreu Smith(Founder)in
Co-investorsY Combinator20VCAirTree VenturesCherry VenturesFCVCTranspose Platform Management
Tabula is a contact data enrichment platform that appends work emails and phone numbers to a user's CSV list by running a waterfall search across 15+ data providers in a single pass.
Data & InfrastructureSaaSSales Tech
Co-investorsBalderton CapitalCrosslink CapitalDag VenturesNew Enterprise Associates (NEA)
turbopuffer is a vector and full-text search database built on object storage (S3), offering low-latency similarity and hybrid search at large scale.
AI & Machine LearningData & InfrastructureDeveloper Tools
Wasmer makes software universally available, providing solutions that enable developers and companies to maximize their potential through its platform and tools.
Cloud ComputingData & InfrastructureDeveloper ToolsEnterprise SoftwareSector AgnosticSan Francisco, US
Syrus Akbary(Founder)in
Co-investorsOSS CapitalY Combinator468 Capital
Portfolio news
latest coverage across their companiesHerald · herald.wales · Aug 22, 2026
CuspAI · cdomagazine.tech · Jul 27, 2026
Anomalo · funderintel.com · Jul 16, 2026
Soda · healthscaping.substack.com · Jul 15, 2026
Higgsfield AI · masternodeai.com · Jul 2, 2026
Orb · Adyen (press release) · Jul 1, 2026
Structured AI · proptechconnect.com · Jun 23, 2026
Frequently asked questions
- How many investments has Zero Prime Ventures made?
- Zero Prime Ventures has 48 tracked investments, 2 of which have exited via acquisition or IPO, including 3 dated in the last 24 months.
- What stage does Zero Prime Ventures invest at?
- Zero Prime Ventures invests at the Pre-Seed, Seed, Series A, Series B stages.
- What is Zero Prime Ventures's typical check size?
- Zero Prime Ventures typically writes checks of $500K – $1.5M.
- What sectors does Zero Prime Ventures focus on?
- Zero Prime Ventures focuses on AI & Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Data & Infrastructure, Deep Tech, Developer Tools, Enterprise Software.
- Where is Zero Prime Ventures located?
- Zero Prime Ventures is headquartered in San Francisco, US.
- Does Zero Prime Ventures lead rounds?
- Yes, Zero Prime Ventures leads investment rounds.
- Who does Zero Prime Ventures co-invest with?
- Zero Prime Ventures most often shares deals with Amplify Partners, Y Combinator, SAV (Scale Asia Ventures), among 113 tracked co-investors.
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