Veteran tech operators with ties to Seattle are launching a new investment firm aimed at what they see as two of the biggest opportunities in today’s economy: AI and cyber intelligence.
VQ Capital is a “thesis-driven, AI-native investment platform” that partners with multibillion-dollar family offices. The firm is headquartered in New York but co-founder Brian Lent plans to build a hub in the Seattle region, where he was an early Amazon leader and later started Medio, a predictive analytics startup acquired by Nokia in 2014.
Lent is teaming up on VQ Capital with longtime colleague John Kim. They first worked together when Lent recruited Kim to join Medio. Kim later went on to become a product exec at Expedia, Vrbo, and PayPal.
Other managing partners include Yotam Avrahami, a former partner at New Vista Capital and Deloitte, and Praveen Hirsave, a former Expedia and Babylon exec who also spent nearly 15 years at IBM.
VQ Capital says it will concentrate on two main themes:
- “Golden Dome” for cyber intelligence — funding technology that unifies isolated cybersecurity tools.
- AI transformation of consumer companies — helping marketing-led brands rebuild customer acquisition, marketing, supply chain, fulfillment and core operations into “compounding, AI-native systems.”
“We believe the biggest winners of this era will be built by small, extraordinary teams capable of out-maneuvering incumbent giants,” Kim said in a statement.
The firm argues that the old pattern of gradual, Moore’s Law-style progress has given way to what it calls an “era of compounding change,” driven by hardware advances, new AI models and large-scale data.
VQ Capital also departs from the standard venture fund structure. Instead of raising a large, long-lived fund up front, the firm works with family office partners on a deal-by-deal basis. The firm describes its approach as a hybrid of private equity discipline and venture-style investing.
Avrahami, a veteran of the Israeli Special Forces, initially started the firm as YA6. He later partnered with Kim and Lent to re-launch as an AI-focused investment platform — what is now known as VQ Capital.
After Nokia acquired Medio, Lent worked at HERE Technologies for two years before launching real estate tech startup Plunk, which closed in 2024. His most recent gig was with Auger, a well-funded logistics startup in Bellevue led by former Amazon exec Dave Clark. Lent was chief analytics and data officer, and departed after seven months to help launch YA6, which evolved into VQ Capital.
