Zero Prime Ventures

Founded in 2020, Citta Capital is a venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. We prefer to invest in early stage and early growth stage companies in AI/ML, big data, cloud, healthcare technology, IoT, marketplaces, SaaS and enterprise, blockchain, and robotics. Our seasoned investment team has a good mix of extensive startup experiences as entrepreneur and strong operating background as senior executive of global companies. We are committed to be your long-term partners to take on challenges and pursue game-changing ideas.

We are at the start of a paradigm shift in software architecture: the wave of decentralised data networks. The movement we have seen build up over the past few years goes beyond Bitcoin and other crypto-assets, or even open source software and blockchains. Taking a broader view, it is the victory of peer-to-peer data networks based on open standards, it reflects the power of properly aligned economic incentives, and it begins to harness the individual data centres in everyone’s pocket, desktop, car, living room and wrist. The movement is made possible by the proliferation of access to high speed wireless broadband, rapidly maturing cloud-native software and a surge of recent machine learning advancements. Over the past few decades, technology architecture advancements have commoditised operating systems and software packages by making them globally accessible via data centres and cloud infrastructure. In this new wave, the data centre is being spread to the very edge of the network and the data itself is being ‘open-sourced’, commoditised into reusable trusted building blocks. Distributed users and machines interact with this data via a substrate of peer-to-peer networks. These peer-to-peer data networks become a ‘fabric’ that validates and curates information inputs without the need for third parties, while empowering individual users with their own data in a usable, secure and scalable manner. To support this vision, Fabric Ventures is adapting the patient venture capital model to investing in decentralised data networks: backing the boldest technologists & communities at the earliest stages, supporting them throughout their journey and becoming active participants within the networks they are building.

Sierra Ventures invests in the future of The Enterprise. We invest early – primarily Seed and Series A – and look for proven product market fit, disruption in the market, and strong IP. We tend to lead investment rounds and reserve capital for follow on rounds to support our entrepreneurs as they grow. We believe that partnership is paramount. We work closely with all of the entrepreneurs we invest in, guiding them with expertise and capital to help their companies grow and deliver on their promise. We understand that great companies don’t get built overnight, and we don’t mind rolling up our sleeves and getting our hands dirty. In fact, we enjoy it. Sierra’s Investment FocusDATA/AI The volume of data has exploded, and with the emergence of the cloud, new tools are being developed with many data infrastructure software platforms focusing specifically on artificial intelligence (AI) & machine learning (ML). We’re excited about companies that make it easier to ingest, access, and analyze data. Sub-sectors within Data/AI include AI/ML and Big Data. VERTICAL SAAS Many industries that rely on excel or pen and paper have been forced to dramatically increase the pace of technology adoption. Vertical SaaS represents the shift to specialization where software is business-specific and is designed for a specific domain. Sub-sectors within Vertical SaaS include FinTech, EnterpriseApps, and Security. INFRASTRUCTURE Next-Gen Infrastructure will be the core connecting fabric for all future technology capabilities. Wide-scale improvement is needed in order to enable applications to run consistently in almost any location across the globe. Organizations have expedited infrastructure modernization strategies which continues to drive growth in the sector. Sub-sectors within Infrastructure include Cloud and IoT. Next-Gen TechnologiesDIGITAL HEALTH Adoption of Health software has been faster than ever before due to the pandemic tailwind and technology trends that put the consumer in charge. New tools are being developed to reach patients creating opportunities with Pharma, Providers, and Payers. We anticipate a dramatic shift towards more value based care (payer / provider) and digitization and decentralization (pharma). WEB3 Web3 promises to make the internet as accessible, open sourced, secure, and decentralized as possible with the goal of benefiting the people engaging, not central organizations. We are looking at the full Web3 ecosystem including Decentralized Applications (DApps), Decentralized Finance (DeFi), Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), Cryptocurrencies, and more. A sub-sector we focus on within Web3 includes Blockchain. INDUSTRIAL AUTOMATION Digitally non-native industries like Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Logistics are seeking ways to find cost parity and production reliability while adhering to increasing demand across the globe. Humans alone will not be able to keep pace with these market trends and automation will be a key driver in movements like Industry 4.0. Sub-sectors within Industrial Automation include Robotics and Devices. CONSUMER The ubiquity of smartphones has enabled consumers to access goods and services with relative ease and companies are tuning into customer needs and engaging with their increasingly loyal customer base, leading to viral adoption patterns. Additionally, Consumer social platforms have allowed individuals to express themselves and make money doing it, giving more power to the “Creator Economy”. We are interested in Creator Economy and mission driven D2C Applications & Marketplaces. ECOMMERCE A fast growing eCommerce market has been bolstered by the pandemic and every part of the value chain is seeing disruption. The eCommerce software market is driven by market trends like headless eCommerce and ReCommerce. B2B eCommerce has exploded globally and we think the US market will catch up in the coming years. A sub-sector we focus on within eCommerce is Marketplaces. EDTECH Digital and tech-enabled learning has been accelerated in the classroom and the boardroom by the pandemic and social trends such as “the great resignation”. Trends like VR/AR and the Metaverse becoming mainstream combined with the price of enablement devices like smartphones, tablets, and computers decreasing to make technology more accessible than ever have created a market that is ripe for EdTech to flourish.

6MV is a thesis driven Web3 Fund investing in the most talented, inventive and tenacious founders across the global crypto and blockchain landscape. Our ethos stems from the game of basketball, where every legendary team has a strong 6th Man to help off the bench. We are building a world-class team to support a portfolio of 100+ projects, protocols & companies and growth of the broader crypto ecosystem. We are hiring a technical investor - someone with engineering experience who is capable of thesis building, sourcing, evaluating and diligencing deals across technical Web3 categories such as infrastructure, decentralized compute & storage, ZKPs, and DeFi. You will also inform our investment strategies across L1/L2 networks and establish yourself as a thoughtful, trusted developer in the respective subcommunities. Lastly, you will develop frameworks to assess the fundamental value of businesses & protocols to help drive portfolio management decisions and execution.

The worldwide data management software market is massive (IDC forecasts it to be $138 billion by 2026!). At MongoDB we are transforming industries and empowering developers to build amazing apps that people use every day. We are the leading modern data platform and the first database provider to IPO in over 20 years. Join our team and be at the forefront of innovation and creativity. Ventures is a new practice at MongoDB created to invest in the most exciting companies solving problems for developers and data practitioners. These range from next-generation Platform-as-a-Service businesses to companies creating foundational infrastructure to enable advanced uses of Generative AI.

Occasionally, a technology comes along that changes everything. AI is that kind of foundational technology. We believe this so deeply that we’re designing an entire organization around it. Conviction is purpose-built to serve “Software 3.0” companies, and to help them achieve their potential as the most important companies of tomorrow. We’ve raised a $100M first fund to back extraordinary founders building these enduring companies. A Little Backstory My parents are founders of a company, and of a new life for our family. My father immigrated from China to Wisconsin in 1987 when he was 24 years old. My mother joined him a year later. Shortly after, I was born. They both worked at Bell Labs/Alcatel-Lucent out of grad school. They are both engineers turned entrepreneurial businesspeople. They both barely spoke English upon arrival. They are two of the bravest people I know. I quite literally grew up inside their tech company – their head of hardware engineering supervised my fumbling build of their first website when I was 14. That website is exactly what you might picture from a budding teenage developer seeped in early 2000’s web aesthetic and thrilled about gradients. I grew up understanding that company-building is Type II fun. “Sleeping over” in the office for bug bashes and building diet coke-can castles with the CTO was my idea of a good time. I remember worrying about my parents being stressed about the innumerable moments of crisis: a big deal falling through, a mammoth competitor trying to murder us with litigation, a product reliability issue, a key hire disappointing. I remember about the number of times we all thought the company wasn’t going to make it. My (abnormal) adolescence forged my view of founders and startups – it gave me the deepest respect for the courage and resilience required to build an enduring company, the permanent expectation that everything is going to be hard, the pervasive sense of fear that it’s just you and your small band of pirates against Goliath and the uncaring world at large. Your only advantages are speed, undeniably good product, a technical thesis*, risk appetite, cleverness, the focus that comes from always being in wartime. And sometimes, insanely, that is enough. More recently, I was lucky to spend almost a decade incubating and investing in startups at Greylock Partners, the very first - and still a legendary - generalist venture capital firm. I worked with thoughtful, experienced, well-connected partners. I had the privilege of learning what made great businesses spring from nothing: first in my initial zones of comfort, infrastructure and security, but then across consumer and enterprise, fintech and crypto. I collaborated with inspiring founders at all stages, but discovered I was, at the core, a glutton for punishment. I loved the challenge of finding product-market fit, and the essentialism of early-stage team building. In the course of hundreds of late night whiteboard sessions, Sunday morning meetings, moments of crisis (and celebration of company milestones) – I built conviction in the kinds of companies I cared about, and the way in which I would partner with them. Software 3.0 Innovation happens inexorably, but at uneven speeds. After years of nothing foundationally new happening (outside of crypto) we are at a special moment in technology history. There has been radical, accelerating progress in machine learning over the past decade, with unexpected core breakthroughs: the shift from classification to generation, and the unreasonable effectiveness of ever-larger, transformers-based general models. We believe the use cases for more general intelligence are, well, general, and will expand over the coming years to every industry. The dominant consumer company of today (TikTok) rethought the content experience with personalized AI. We expect the dominant companies of tomorrow to rethink every industry with intelligence. We are excited to invest up and down the intelligence stack: in chips, data infrastructure and developer tools, research labs, and AI-native applications in every vertical. We believe that better tooling, cheaper and more abundant compute, more data, more open source models, and more AI-educated talent will lead to ten thousand experiments. We believe (despite the recent excitement) that AI's impact is still underestimated. Arming the Builders These intelligent “Software 3.0” companies will both need to be great software businesses in the traditional sense (and can thus benefit from great networks and tribal knowledge), and will also be something entirely alien. If Software 1.0 was about human-written code, and Software 2.0 is about dataset labeling, Software 3.0 will be about manipulating foundation models. Conviction is a new kind of investment firm that aims to bridge that gap, by helping extraordinary founders harness what is enduring, and designing from a clean sheet of paper a firm purpose-built to enable AI-natives. Here are a few of the ways we expect to operate differently: We are hands-on. That means operational contributions measured in outcomes (talent, customers, data and compute access), as well as leading operators and technologists in-network and in-house. We are deep in our domain. AI-native companies encounter entirely novel challenges. We are building the new playbooks together – for both product challenges (gracefully handling the error matrix for a model, designing product to manage hallucinations or abusive prompts, reducing per-customer fine-tuning) to the commercial (packaging and selling category-creating products that replace human labor). We expect to learn with our companies, but always be on the bleeding edge. We will create community, and contribute to our community. Conviction will serve as a Schelling Point for the brightest minds in AI. We care about industry progress. We know there are more great companies to be built than we have capacity to back. We are long-term oriented, true believers. AI has come into fashion before, and also gone through troughs of disillusionment. We expect this to continue. We expect to take technical risk. We believe the prize is worth the patience. Finally, we believe that AI is crucial – not only for our own efforts but for our nation and for our global society. There are important policy and public opinion considerations in privacy, information integrity, national security, safety. We will partner with our portfolio and the ecosystem to contribute to these discussions. We believe AI can be a force for abundance, good, and compounding innovation; we have a responsibility to invest in enabling that. First Steps and First Principles Our LP base includes ~50 Founders, CEOs and COOs of the most important companies of today, who believe that AI is critical to their businesses’ success tomorrow. We are grateful to our early institutional investors, and to our individual entrepreneurial backers as we take our first steps. Conviction is a distinct choice of name for a venture firm, and intentional. Most venture firms are designed for optionality, not conviction. However, we do not believe in a one-size-fits-all approach to venture investing. When we have conviction that a technology market is generational, we design and build an entire organization around it from first principles. The first market for us is Software 3.0. If you are a founder or investor and want to shape the future of AI, please reach out. We are growing our team and always on the hunt for people starting enduring companies. We also welcome interested people to apply for our programs: Communities (our event series), Conviction Fellowships (for young talent), Visiting Researchers (full and part-time), and Visiting Builders (operators and founders, interested in AI). *Part of their technical thesis was (and is) more intelligent networks.