General Partners
The core investment team at Milestone AI Ventures.
Dr. Sarah Chen
Managing Partner & Co-FounderPreviously Research Director at Google DeepMind, where she led the Natural Language Understanding team. Holds a Ph.D. in Machine Learning from MIT and was an early engineer at Waymo. Sarah led our investments in NeuralFlow AI, Cognex Health, and Guardrail Systems.
Focus: AI/ML, Healthcare AI, AI Safety
Marcus Rivera
General Partner & Co-FounderFormer CTO at Databricks and Senior Principal Engineer at Palantir. Marcus brings deep expertise in distributed systems, data infrastructure, and MLOps. Led seed investments in DataNexus, FluxPipe, StratosAI, and OmniLabel. Holds an M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford.
Focus: Data Infrastructure, MLOps, Developer Tools
Priya Nair
General PartnerFormer VP of Product at OpenAI and Head of Applied AI at Salesforce. Priya has launched four enterprise AI products with $100M+ in revenue. She leads our investments in AI-native vertical applications and enterprise software companies. B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Caltech.
Focus: Enterprise AI, Vertical Software, LLM Applications
Partners
Our extended investment and platform team.
James Okafor
Partner, FinTech AIFormer quant at Two Sigma and Head of AI at Stripe. Leads investments in AI-powered financial services, risk, and RegTech.
FinTech, Quant AI, Risk
Elena Vasquez
Partner, Autonomous SystemsRobotics researcher from Carnegie Mellon, and founding engineer at Nuro. Leads investments in autonomous systems, computer vision, and physical AI.
Robotics, Computer Vision, Edge AI
David Park
PrincipalFormer AI product manager at Meta and Microsoft Research. Leads sourcing in enterprise AI and contributes to diligence across all investment categories.
Enterprise AI, Product Strategy
Advisor Network
150+ OperatorsThe Milestone Advisor Network includes former CTOs, VPs of Engineering, and Chief AI Officers from leading technology companies who provide support to portfolio founders.
Operating Principles
The values that guide how we invest and how we support our portfolio companies.
Technical Credibility First
We read papers, write code, and engage at the technical level with every founder we back. Our team's backgrounds mean we can evaluate technology objectively, provide substantive engineering feedback, and credibly vouch for our portfolio companies' technical approaches to follow-on investors and potential customers.
Radical Transparency
We say no quickly and explain why in detail. When we invest, we share our full reasoning and concerns with founders. We maintain an open-door policy for candid conversations about strategy, competitive dynamics, and company health -- because surprises are the enemy of great outcomes for everyone involved.
Bias for Action
Seed-stage companies need investors who can move at startup speed. We complete first-round diligence within two weeks, deliver term sheets the same week as a decision, and are reachable nights and weekends when critical situations arise. Speed of execution at seed stage is a competitive advantage that compounds.
Long-Term Orientation
We are patient capital. The best AI companies take a decade to build. We resist the pressure to push founders toward premature revenue optimization or growth at the expense of technical moats. Our fund structure allows us to stay invested through the full company lifecycle without artificial time pressure.
Join Our Network
We are always looking for exceptional AI operators and researchers to join our advisor network and help our portfolio companies scale.