Foothill Ventures recently hosted a co-investor and founder mixer event at Los Altos Golf and Country Club. With over 30 CEOs/executives from our portfolio and an incredible group of co-investors, the event was filled with meaningful conversations and a gathering of some of the brightest minds in tech innovation and investing. The highlight of the event was a panel discussion moderated by our Managing Partner Xuhui Shao, featuring visionary CEOs: Phoebe Yao at Pareto.AI, Sam Liang at Otter.ai, Bob S. at Goodcall, and Bryan Lee at Ruli, who shared valuable insights on how AI is transforming productivity for startups. A big thank you to our panelists for sharing these insights and to all attendees for engaging in a lively, forward-looking discussion. We extend a heartfelt thank you to everyone who attended, especially our amazing co-investors from Qualcomm Ventures, SIERRA Ventures, SignalFire, GV (Google Ventures), Tau Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Samsung Ventures, Samsung Catalyst Fund, TDK Ventures, Applied Ventures, Matter Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Industry Ventures, and many others. We are deeply grateful for each of you and the contributions you bring to this thriving ecosystem. Here's to many more exciting ventures together! 🚀
Foothill Ventures
Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
Los Altos, California 9,462 followers
Seed stage investors with a preference for highly technical founders. Investing in Software, Life Science, and Deep Tech
About us
We are a team of seasoned executives and entrepreneurs, who have deep experience working in both the US and China. We are highly technical, with 7 PhDs and over 150 patents filed among our investment team
- Website
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https://foothill.ventures
External link for Foothill Ventures
- Industry
- Venture Capital and Private Equity Principals
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Headquarters
- Los Altos, California
- Type
- Privately Held
- Founded
- 2017
Locations
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Primary
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280 Second Street, Suite C
Los Altos, California 94022, US
Employees at Foothill Ventures
Updates
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More detail on what we invest in: Eric Rosenblum digs into our AI cluster, which spans AI applications, software infrastructure, hardware infrastructure (largely semiconductors for compute and networking) and semiconductor manufacturing that supports advanced chips. This is a hugely important cluster to us, and drove our investments in applications like Otter.ai, DeepScribe, Turing AI , Hayden AI, Fox Robotics, WeRide, software infra like OmniML, MemVerge, AI inference chip start-ups TetraMem - Accelerate The World and d-Matrix, photonic interconnect start-ups like Quintessent Inc. and HyperLight, and semiconductor manufacturing companies like ChEmpower Corporation and PseudolithIC. Tagging Sam Liang, Matthew Ko, Chris Carson, Marin Tchakarov, Peter Anderson-Sprecher, Tony Han, Di Wu, Charles Fan, Ning Ge, Ph.D., MBA, Sid Sheth, Alan Liu, Mian Zhang, Sudhanshu Misra, Dan Green; Lu Zhang, Michael Berolzheimer, Alexei Andreev, Wayne Hu, Scott Walbrun, Stan Reiss, Sasha Ostojic, Alexander Fang (He/Him), Maynard Kang, Phil Inagaki, Peter Chung https://lnkd.in/eK9D_qur
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This is a pretty great accomplishment: DeepScribe working with Texas Oncology to make their physicians more effective by freeing them from crushing paperwork. Go, go Matthew Ko and team
Today, we're proud to feature an exceptional healthcare group - the largest private oncology practice in the world. The 1,000+ clinicians of Texas Oncology bring their expertise and compassion to cancer patients every day, across more than 240 clinic locations. Not too long ago, as Dr. Gury Doshi will tell you, she and her clinical teams were spending an excessive amount of time documenting the day’s visits at home (yes, often in their pajamas). Missed family time. Risk of burnout. Compromised physician wellbeing. On top of it all, oncology requires comprehensive patient charts, and cancer visits are frequently too complex to document (and recall) fully at the end of a long day. Better documentation can mean better care. Then, Texas Oncology partnered with DeepScribe to address the problem, and have since completed more than 150,000 encounters with our oncology-specific AI scribing. As Texas Oncology VP of Operations Mike Marino, EdD says, their adoption goal “was blasted from the beginning,” with clinician adoption between 70 and 90 percent. Our teams are so proud to work with the leaders and clinicians at Texas Oncology, ensuring an ambient AI solution that’s just right for them: AI that is easy to use, is natural to their workflow, and understands what oncologists want – and need – in a clinical note. Anyone who’s been to a Texas Oncology clinic sees the passion and care with which they treat patients. We spent time recently doing just that, talking with some of the team, and learning how DeepScribe ambient AI has become part of their day and patient visits. Check out the video for more. #oncology #specialtycare #ambientAI #patientexperience #clinicianwellbeing
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HUGE congratulations to WeRide for its NASDAQ listing (and especially Tony Han for building one of the world's top self-driving car companies). The bell-ringing ceremony is fun, but it's really the end product of a lot of engineering, operations, finance, BD... everything. From a Foothill perspective, kudos to partner Xuhui Shao, who made this as a seed investment way back in 2017. Huge congratulations to Qiming Venture Partners' Duane Kuang, NVIDIA's Jeff Herbst, Nautilus' Connie Sheng, and other early investors!)
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Looking to pitch your start-up? Here's our guide to what Foothill Ventures invests in. We will periodically update as our investment scope changes. https://lnkd.in/ewXKMfxf
What we invest in at Foothill Ventures
medium.com
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As always, Jim Fan and his team at NVIDIA create fantastic products (and are really good at explaining their importance). In this case, a great case for a small model for humanoid robot training simulation.
NVIDIA Senior Research Manager & Lead of Embodied AI (GEAR Group). Stanford Ph.D. Building Humanoid robot and gaming foundation models. OpenAI's first intern. Sharing insights on the bleeding edge of AI.
Not every foundation model needs to be gigantic. We trained a 1.5M-parameter neural network to control the body of a humanoid robot. It takes a lot of subconscious processing for us humans to walk, maintain balance, and maneuver our arms and legs into desired positions. We capture this “subconsciousness” in HOVER, a single model that learns how to coordinate the motors of a humanoid robot to support locomotion and manipulation. We trained HOVER in NVIDIA Isaac, a GPU-powered simulation suite that accelerates physics by 10,000x faster than real time. To put the number in perspective, the robots undergo 1 year of intense training in a virtual “dojo”, but take only ~50 minutes of wall clock time on one GPU card. The neural net then transfers zero-shot to the real world without finetuning. HOVER can be *prompted* for various types of high-level motion instructions that we call “control modes”. To name a few: - Head and hand poses - can be captured by XR devices like Apple Vision Pro. - Whole-body poses - via MoCap or RGB camera. - Whole-body joint angles - Exoskeleton. - Root velocity command - Joysticks. What HOVER enables: - A unified interface for us to control the robot using whichever input devices are convenient at hand. - An easier way to collect whole-body teleoperation data for training. - An upstream Vision-Language-Action model to provide motion instructions, which HOVER translates to low-level motor signals at high frequency. HOVER supports any humanoid that can be simulated in Isaac. Bring your own robot, and watch it come to life! It's a big teamwork from NVIDIA GEAR Lab and collaborators: Tairan He, Wenli Xiao, Toru Lin, Zhengyi Luo, Zhenjia Xu, Zhenyu Jiang, Jan Kautz, Changliu Liu, Guanya Shi, Xiaolong Wang Team leads: Jim Fan, Yuke Zhu Website: https://lnkd.in/g6WrJyRC Paper: https://lnkd.in/g99yWTPa
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Nice to see AM Batteries get recognized as one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2024 list! Dry electrodes are one of the holy grails of making batteries cost effective and sustainable. This is a major milestone in the transition to electric vehicles. Watch this space! Congratulations to Yan Wang, Heng Pan and Lie Shi! (tagging 🌱🤝🌍 Anil Achyuta, Qianran (Katherine) He, PhD, Jimmy Kan, Josh Stiling, Lisa Coca, Ethan Sohn, Kyle Teamey, Kathryn Meng, Alex Luce, Carly X., Jonathan Roosevelt)
We're thrilled to announce that AM Batteries’ Powder to Electrode™ dry coating technology was included in TIME’s Best Inventions of 2024 list in the Manufacturing and Materials category. At AM Batteries, every step—from our early research days to shipping our first rolls of electrode materials—has been driven by a shared vision: enabling cheaper and cleaner batteries. This recognition by TIME validates our ongoing work to reshape the battery industry. Thank you to our dedicated team and partners, who have made this achievement possible. We can’t wait to see what’s next as we push forward for a more sustainable world. We truly are the leaders in Dry Battery Electrode technology! Check out our award in the TIME’s Best Inventions here: https://lnkd.in/egZJ3cSZ #AMBatteries #TIMEBestInventions #Sustainability #Innovation #CleanEnergy #BatteryTech #Lithium #DryBatteryElectrode
AM Batteries Powder to Electrode Method: the 200 Best Inventions of 2024
time.com
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Foothill Ventures reposted this
Last Thursday, Foothill Ventures hosted a portfolio entrepreneurs + co-investors summit at the Los Altos Golf and Country Club. Besides great food & drink, networking, we also hosted a panel to discuss how AI tools are helping founders and teams to be more productive. Here are some of the key takeaways from that: 1. Using AI tools can significantly improve productivity in various areas like marketing, engineering, and sales. 2. There is a paradigm shift happening where humans are transitioning from doing traditional tasks to managing AI-generated content. Documenting workflows and creating evaluation rubrics for AI outputs is crucial. 3. Voice AI has the potential to transform everyday workflows and work culture, including the development of AI sales agents that can assist or even conduct sales calls independently. 4. Integrating AI into coding and legal workflows requires careful consideration. While AI tools can boost efficiency, human oversight and understanding of the limitations are essential to avoid mistakes. 5. Defining ground truth and creating comprehensive evaluation rubrics are complex tasks, particularly in frontier research domains, that require collaboration between subject matter experts and AI researchers. Thanks to our panelists Phoebe Yao, Bob S., Sam Liang, and Bryan Lee; and our co-investors from Qualcomm Ventures, SIERRA Ventures, SignalFire, GV (Google Ventures), Tau Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Samsung Ventures, Samsung Catalyst Fund, TDK Ventures, Applied Ventures, Matter Venture Partners, Intel Capital, Industry Ventures and many others. (BTW the key take-away bullet points above are entirely generated by Otter.ai )
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With WeRide's NASDAQ IPO last week, it's a good time to remind people that China has already moved into full commercial rollout with self-driving vehicles: this includes robotaxis, robo buses and even robo street sweepers. This will be one of the more interesting global markets over the coming decade, with Waymo (and Aurora) accelerating their rollout, Tesla joining the party, and WeRide, Pony and Baidu piling on from China. It took longer than everyone expected, but self-driving is finally here.
Cyber Security Top Voice 💫 Cloud Vulnerability Management I Risk Assessment I Threat Intelligence I GCP Azure AWS SecOps IAM
👽 Elon Musk makes a promise of Tesla "robovan" in the future, but China is not talking about prototypes, they're already done with the tests, and their van is already publicly available 🚗 #China #ai #engineering
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US battery manufacturing continues to climb... The passage of the IRA has had a very quick effect on the onshoring of battery production. This is just the tip of the iceberg. there are public resources available listing the geofactories that have already been announced in the US, and the amount of capacity coming online in the next few years is stunning. It is a good time to be selling battery manufacturing equipment in the US
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