Brian Zhan
InvestorPartner at Striker Venture Partners Β· Investor at CRV (Charles River Ventures)
San Francisco Bay Area
About
Brian Zhan is a Partner at Striker Venture Partners, where he focuses on backing technical founders at inception, often as the first investor. He began his career on Facebook's Presto team and previously served as a Principal at CRV. He works with founders on technical roadmaps, moving from research breakthroughs to products, and building founding engineering teams.
Brian Zhan @brianzhan1
Very prescient for Forbes Next Billion-Dollar Startups list to feature @ElorianAI as the cover page pick. Multimodal reasoning is a large use cases for all of the frontier models, but reasoning across modalities is ignored by the large labs in favor of coding. Elorian is solving https://t.co/S9TzkT7xge
Jul 28, 2026 Β· β₯ 17 Β· β 1
Brian Zhan @brianzhan1
Seeing a major narrative violation on "semis sold off on "cheap Chinese open models kill compute demand." Kimi K3 API costs $3 input / $15 output per million tokens. Claude Opus 4.8 costs $5 / $25. K3 is a 2.8T param model that reasons at max effort, burning 13k+ thinking
Jul 27, 2026 Β· β₯ 27 Β· β 1
Brian Zhan @brianzhan1
After Putnam perfect score, Axiom just got a perfect score at IMO 2026. Consistent performance. https://t.co/2YZEBp0DOx
Jul 17, 2026 Β· β₯ 36 Β· β 5
Invests in
AI & Machine LearningDeep TechRobotics
Experience
- Striker Venture PartnersPartnercurrent2025 β present
- Elorian AIBoard Directorcurrent2026 β present
- Skild AIInvestorcurrent2024 β present
- Ricursive IntelligenceSeed Investorcurrent2025 β present
- Edison ScientificSeed Investorcurrent2025 β present
- ReflectionAIBoard Obsever2024 β 2026
- CRVPrincipal2023 β 2025San Francisco Bay Area
- Dyna RoboticsBoard Observer2024 β 2025
- Lepton AIBoard Observer2023 β 2025
- Voyage AI (part of MongoDB)Board Observer2023 β 2025
- LanceDBSeed Investor2023 β 2025
- Deductive AIBoard Observer2023 β 2025
- StarburstProduct2021 β 2022Palo Alto, California, United States
- FacebookProduct2018 β 2021Menlo Park, CA
Education
- Northwestern University
Skills & more
Languages Chinese Β· English
From Brian's professional profile.
Same school
Also attended Northwestern University278
+ 272 more
Shared employers
Also worked at Ricursive Intelligence5
Also worked at Edison Scientific3
Investments
Board seats
Dyna RoboticsLepton AIPeriodic LabsReflection AISkildVoyage AI
Per the firm's website.
Colleagues at Striker Venture Partners
Network12
Investors connected to Brian in public investor directories β a warm-intro map.