Feyza Haskaraman is joining Felicis Ventures 1 as a partner after several years at Menlo Ventures, Crunchbase News has exclusively learned.
In her new role, Haskaraman will focus on investing in “soon-to-break-out” AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and applications companies for Felicis, an early-stage firm with $3.9 billion in assets under management.
During her time at Menlo, Haskaraman sourced and led investments in startups including Semgrep, Astrix, Abacus, Parade and CloudTrucks — zeroing in early on how AI is reshaping developer security and enterprise infrastructure.
Haskaraman, an MIT graduate who was born in Turkey, brings an engineering background to her role as an investor. She previously worked as an engineer at various companies at different growth stages, including Analog Devices, Fitbit and Nucleus Scientific. She is also a former McKinsey & Co. consultant who advised multibillion-dollar technology companies and early-stage startups on strategy and operations. It was after working with startups at McKinsey that her interest in venture capital was piqued, and she joined Insight Partners.
Her decision to join Menlo Park, California-based Felicis stems from a shared interest alongside firm founder and managing partner Aydin Senkut to build communities even in “unsexy” industries such as infrastructure and security, she said.
“Whether it’s connecting AI founders or bringing together technical and cybersecurity communities, the mission is the same: Believe in the best founders early and help them go the distance,” she told Crunchbase News.
Felicis is currently investing out of its 10th fund, a $900 million vehicle, its largest yet. More than 60% of its investments out of Fund 9 and 10 (so far) are seed stage; 94% are seed or Series A. In 83% of its investments, Felicis has led or co-led the round.
Nearly $3 out of every $4 that it’s deployed have gone into AI-related companies, including n8n, Supabase, Mercor, Crusoe Energy Systems, Periodic Labs, Runway, Revel, Skild AI, Deep Infra, Browser Use, Evertune, Poolside, Letta and LMArena.
In an interview, Haskaraman shared more about her investment plans at Felicis, as well as why she thinks we’re in the “early innings” with AI. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Let’s talk more about community-building and why you think it’s so important.
Over the past few years in the venture ecosystem, just providing the capital is not enough. You need to surround yourself with the best talent. You’re seeing one of the fiercest talent wars in terms of AI talent.
So one of the things that I’ve spent a lot of time on in my VC career is building a community, going back to my MIT roots, surrounding myself with founders, engineers and operators, and also going into specific domains, like cybersecurity — just building a network of CISOs that I communicate with regularly and really support them however I can, and then obviously get their take on the latest technology.
That type of community-building effort is something that Aydin and I will be debating strategy for Felicis as well.
Yes, Aydin (Felicis’ founder) has said that he thinks the next generation of enterprise investors aren’t just picking companies, they’re building ecosystems. Would you agree with that?
Yes, we’re fully aligned on that. First of all, it’s a way of sourcing. Being able to source the best founders involves surrounding yourself in a community of people. You get very close to them, and you want to be the first call when they decide to jump ship and start a business.
As early-connection investors, we want to invest in the founders as early as possible. So that’s why we want to immerse ourselves in these communities that provide prolific grounds for the technical founders that are coming in and building an AI.
You were investing in AI before the big boom took off. Would you say there’s too much hype around the space?
You are correct that there is a lot of euphoria around AI, but if you look at the overall landscape, we haven’t seen a technology that can have such a large impact.
And we’re already seeing the results in enterprises that buyers of these solutions, and consumers of these solutions, including myself and our team, are seeing immense amounts of productivity gains. I remain immensely optimistic about the future and investing in AI, and that’s what we are paid to do, and what I also enjoy as a former engineer.
Are there specific aspects of AI that have you particularly excited?
I personally feel we’re still very much at the early innings. It’s been three years since ChatGPT came out, and the model companies really pushed their products into our lives. But if you take a look at what’s happening now, we have agents that are coordinating and automating our work.
What are ways in which we should be securing agent architecture? And that is also evolving across the board, and if you think about another layer down, like the infrastructure to support these LLMs and agents, I have to ask “What do we need underneath?”
I think there’s a lot more that will come, and there’s a lot of hope for innovation that will happen both across the infrastructure layer, as well as agents. There’s also the issue of “can applications actually be enabled?” I go back to the importance of securing our interactions with the agents and making sure that they’re not abused and misused. It’s a great time to be investing in AI.
What stages are you primarily investing in at Felicis?
We try to go as early as possible. But obviously, given our fund’s size, we have flexibility to invest whenever we see the venture scale returns make sense. But the majority of our investments are seed.
It’s such a competitive investing environment right now. How do you stand out?
Ultimately, what founders value is how you will work with them, your references. They value how you show up in those tough times, how you surround them with talent, how you help them see around the corners. That matters a lot.
I believe that winning boils down to the prior founder experiences that you left, people who can speak highly of you and how you work. I tend to be a big hustler. So, there’s a lot more value-add that we want to make sure we bring to the table, even before investments. And then after the investment we can continue to bring that type of value to a company.
Are you investing outside of AI?
I’m investing in AI infrastructure, cybersecurity and AI-enabled apps. We are also at the verge of a big overhaul in terms of the application layer, companies that we’ve seen prior to AI — that is all getting disrupted.
We’re seeing AI scribes in healthcare intake solutions, for example. We’re seeing code-generation solutions in developer stacks. We are looking at every single vertical, as well as horizontal application. I’m very interested in how all of these verticals’ application layers will get a different type of automation.
What’s your take on the market overall right now?
I feel like I lived three lifetimes in my investing career — just over the past few years. We as a VC community and tech ecosystem learned a lot, obviously, just in terms of what’s happening. We’re seeing new ingredients in the market, and that is AI, that did not exist during COVID.
Think about the fact that this is not a structural change in the market driven by the economy. This is truly a new technology. I would bucket those waves as separate.
I’m very grateful to be investing at this time. What a time to be investing, because AI is truly game-changing as a technology.
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