4 Trends for AI Startups and Generative AI Companies | NEA
Talks about generative AI, startup company-building and Perplexity AI
AJ
Aaron Jacobson
Director at Second Front Systems
San Francisco, California
Overview
Aaron Jacobson is a Partner at NEA in San Francisco, with a background in venture capital, investments, and M&A. He has successfully invested in companies like Pulumi, Embrace, and Bitglass, focusing on sectors such as Cleantech and Cybersecurity, and has an educational background in Economics and Engineering from The Wharton School and University of Pennsylvania.
Aaron Jacobson's career highlights include his role as a Partner at NEA, where he leads investments in Series A and Series B companies in sectors like ClimateTech and AI, and his successful investments in companies like Pulumi and Bitglass, contributing to their growth and success.
Work Experience
Partner
2011 - Current
My focus is AI, cybersecurity, developer tools, cloud infrastructure, and autonomy / robotics. I currently serve as a director of Veza, Firestorm Labs, Second Front, Flox, Crowdbotics, Embrace, Rapid Robotics, Pulumi, Deltastream, Outrider, Mayhem, Tigera, and Juvo. I also serve as a Board Observer at Horizon3.ai and Databricks and work with other portfolio companies such as Martian and Built Robotics. Previous investments include Streamsets (Acq. by Software AG), Box (NYSE:Box), NGINX (Acq. by F5), and illusive networks (Acq. by Proofpoint). Other investment experiences includes: Bloom Energy, Coursera, BlockCypher, CareZone, CCP Games, Cohere Technologies, Gainspeed, GuideSpark, Hyperpilot, iopipe, Igneous Systems, Kumu Networks, Lattice Engines, Luminate Wireless, Mimosa Networks, Psikick, Silk, Stormpath, and Transfix.
New Enterprise Associates is a venture capital firm that focuses on investments in technology and healthcare startups.
Board Observer
2014
Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems.
Databricks is an AI cloud data platform that interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud.
Raised $3,997,000,000.00 from Firestreak Ventures and Bossa Invest.
Director
2025
Veza is the leader in identity security, helping organizations secure access across the enterprise. Veza’s Access Platform goes beyond identity governance and administration (IGA) tools to visualize, monitor, and control entitlements so that organizations can stay compliant and achieve least privilege. Global enterprises like Wynn Resorts, Expedia, and Blackstone trust Veza to manage identity security use cases, including privileged access monitoring, non-human identity (NHI) security, access entitlement management, data system access, SaaS access security, IAM hygiene, identity security posture management (ISPM), and next-generation IGA. Founded in 2020, Veza is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, and is funded by Accel, Bain Capital, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures (GV), NEA, Norwest Venture Partners, and True Ventures.
Veza is a data security platform that helps users use and share their data safely.
Raised $125,000,000.00 from The Syndicate Group.
Director
2024
Firestorm Labs specializes in advanced additive manufacturing technologies, developing modular, open-architecture unmanned aerial systems (UAS) for rapid deployment in expeditionary and combat environments.
Developing Low-Cost, Modular Unmanned Systems. Designed For Warfighters. Future-Proofed For Tomorrow.
Raised $40,519,500.00 from Bravo Victor Venture Capital, Overmatch Ventures, Backswing Ventures, IronGate Capital Advisors, Decisive Point, Feld Ventures, Red Cat, Cubit Capital, Lockheed Martin Ventures and Beyond Capital.
Director
2023
Second Front Systems (2F) fast-tracks government access to disruptive, commercially-proven software as a service (SaaS) applications for national security missions. Leading software providers—ranging from publicly traded defense contractors to startups—and global government agencies trust 2F's Game Warden DevSecOps platform and secure cloud hosting environment to accelerate their delivery and harness the cloud revolution at scale. For more information, visit https://secondfront.com.
Investor
2023
Martian built the first model router, backed by $9M from NEA, General Catalyst, CVP, and Prosus Ventures. You can think of us like Google for LLMs: every time you send us a request, we automatically find and use the LLM which will give you the best result at the lowest cost. Engineers at 300+ companies, from Amazon to Zapier, have used Martian to achieve higher performance and lower costs, with greater security and reliability. The team consists of previous AI researchers at Stanford, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, the Google Bard Team, and Microsoft Research who have previously built and sold multiple NLP companies and published in the leading AI research journals.
Director
2023
flox brings the power of Nix to everyone by offering the first end-to-end solution that empowers teams to accelerate and simplify their Systems Development Life Cycle. flox is the secure way to manage and deploy software in isolated and reproducible development or runtime environments. For more information, please visit:
Flox offers developers, platform engineers, and operators reproducible environments that span the enterprise SDLC. Bringing Nix to Work!
Raised $23,921,027.00 from Guy Podjarny, New Enterprise Associates, Addition, Thomas Dohmke, Tapestry VC, Aaron Applbaum, James Turnbull and Hetz Ventures.
Director
2022
CoreStory unlocks the hidden intelligence in your legacy code. By using AI to surface business logic and technical insights, we give enterprises the clarity to modernize faster, maintain apps smarter, and reduce the risk of costly failures.
Director
2021
Embrace's mission is to transform all companies to mobile by empowering them to deliver incredible mobile experiences. Embrace is the only observability and data platform built for mobile. With Embrace, teams proactively uncover, prioritize, and instantly solve issues before they affect a business' bottom line. More than 100 organizations worldwide — and many of the world's best mobile companies — including Hyatt, GOAT, Glo, Depop, Dave, and ChowNow, use Embrace to proactively optimize their mobile experiences.
Embrace helps mobile engineers build better experiences.
Raised $77,000,000.00 from AV8 Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Eniac Ventures and Greycroft.
Director
2021
Rapid Robotics is the creator of the first affordable robotic machine operator designed for simple machine tasks. Available for just $25K a year and requiring absolutely no programming, systems integration, specialized hardware or robotics skills, the Rapid Machine Operator enables manufacturers to easily deploy a pre-trained cobot in hours, moving it between tasks as needed and seeing ROI in months. Rapid Robotics’ founding team combines robotics and manufacturing expertise with a SaaS business model to deliver affordable solutions to real-world industry problems. Investors include NEA, Greycroft, Bee Partners and 468 Capital. The company is based in San Francisco, California.
Rapid Robotics provides risk-free robotic palletizing solutions for manufacturing and logistics.
Raised $54,200,000.00 from 468 Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Tiger Global Management, Bee Partners, Kleiner Perkins and Greycroft.
Education
B.S. in Economics
2005 - 2009
B.S. in Engineering
2005 - 2009
Investments
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