Frontier Tech Investor
Investing across climate, software, and technologies reshaping the physical world.
At Kayak Ventures, we angel invest at the Pre-Seed and Seed stage in founders building frontier technologies that are reshaping industries and creating entirely new ones.
Our perspective is shaped by 40+ years of combined experience in technology, from building and operating companies to investing at their earliest stages. For the past seven years, we've invested in climate and hardtech, giving us experience at the intersection of the digital and physical worlds.
Today, our investments span energy, critical minerals, advanced materials and manufacturing to AI, software, health and bio.
Across the physical world, sustainability remains core to how we invest. We look for technologies that make industries better, cheaper, more resilient, and more sustainable — where environmental benefits strengthen the underlying economics rather than depend on a green premium.
Climate & the Physical World
We invest in frontier technologies transforming the physical systems and resources the world depends on.
Our focus includes energy, critical minerals, advanced materials, manufacturing and robotics, and resilience & adaptation. We are particularly drawn to technologies that unlock new capabilities while improving efficiency, resilience, resource use, or sustainability.
AI, Software & Bio
We invest in frontier technologies changing what is possible in the digital and biological worlds.
Our focus includes AI infrastructure, vertical AI, healthcare, and biological technologies, particularly where new technology enables fundamentally better products, business models, or ways of operating.
What We Look For
Across sectors, we back ambitious founders applying new technologies to large markets and industries ripe for transformation.
We gravitate toward companies with double-sided value propositions — products that solve an immediate customer need while creating additional economic, environmental, or strategic value as they scale.
We often invest when a technology or market is still emerging and the path to building a category-defining company isn't yet obvious.
Who We Are
We are entrepreneurs, operators, and investors with over 40 years of combined experience. We know what it takes to build zero-to-one products and scale up teams from the earliest stages.
Julia has 15+ years of early-stage investing experience across 100+ startups.
She joined Facebook in 2007 when it was just 200 people and spent most of her time on the Platform team working with entrepreneurs and developers.
She got her start in venture as part of Facebook's two-person fbFund team, backed by Accel and Founders Fund. Through fbFund, she helped fund Lyft (IPO), TaskRabbit (acquired by IKEA), Life360 (IPO), Wildfire (acquired by Google), and 50+ other teams when they were just 2–4 people.
After Facebook, Julia spent 8+ years as a founder and CEO of startups in the social good, travel, and fashion spaces. She also helped start Startup UCLA, an entrepreneurship program that has now been running for 15+ years.
On the advisor side, Julia brings her own founder experience to help companies get through their “firsts” — first product, first fundraise, first launch, and more. Given this, she often meets teams in their first 1–2 years as a company and helps them grow and get to the next level.
Julia has been angel investing through Kayak Ventures since 2019, bringing together her experience as an early-stage investor, founder, and operator.
After holding engineering roles at a number of early-stage startups, Andrew founded a company providing browser-based statistical analysis tools at a time when single-page web apps were just gaining steam. As CEO, he learned how to grow teams and navigate the challenges of selling to large organizations like universities.
In 2012, he joined Facebook to learn how to maintain large-scale web applications. There, he became one of the first engineers to use React in a production application, setting the path for his career. Over the last decade, he's worked closely with React and associated technologies, driving their adoption and increasing the ways in which they can be leveraged. As an engineering manager across multiple teams, he supported the modern rewrite of facebook.com, as well as the expansion of its underlying framework into a system used by web and native products across Meta.
While working on products like Parse and Oculus, Andrew grew an affinity for tools that help developers and designers get their jobs done faster. Alongside climate technology, this has become his main area of investment focus.
