Slater Stich

Stich grew up in New Smyrna Beach on Florida’s Atlantic coast and learned to surf in middle school. He earned a bachelor’s degree from Princeton University.⁠[1][1][2]

He enrolled in the math PhD program at the University of California, Berkeley, but dropped out, and then started his career as a data scientist at Square. He later earned an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, after which he led the data science team at Valor Equity Partners.⁠[3][2][3]

He then founded Activation Fund, a data-focused seed fund, investing in early rounds of companies including BigEye, Census, Equals, Hex, Preql, and Replicate. His first investment was Replicate, which at the time was building a lightweight ML version control system and later became known for making it easy to publish and run open source AI models. He said that using the product helped him understand the technical decisions the founders had made, and that he knew he wanted to invest in founders who could make products like that.⁠[2][3][1][1][1][1]

He joined Bain Capital in 2022 and is based in San Francisco, with an interest in practical products that make life better for the working software engineer, data scientist, or other technical individual contributor. As of October 2026, his title at Bain Capital is Managing Director on the Ventures team, and his title at BCV is Partner.⁠[2][2][1][1]

On January 26, 2023, BCV announced Stich and Saanya OjhaSaanya OjhaSaanya Ojha is a venture capitalist and a partner at Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), where she partners with growth-stage founders in AI, software infrastructure, and cybersecurity.Open the full entry, who joined from Coatue, as its newest partners. BCV said he brings product acumen combined with a commercial mindset, which helps founders with everything from the product roadmap to pricing, and that he would continue to focus on early-stage investing at BCV.⁠[3][3][3][3]

Polars, the developer of a Rust-based DataFrame library, announced a $4 million seed round led by BCV with participation from individual investors, to be used to expand the team and build a compute platform to run Polars at any scale. Commenting as a partner at BCV, Stich said Polars would let data scientists and engineers focus less on infrastructure and handle much larger data sets, even on a single node.⁠[4][4][4][4]

He published an article arguing that Rust is replacing C as the “backend” workhorse language for high-performance Python packages: Python is easy to write but slow to run; in the past, writing data processing libraries meant learning C or relying on someone else’s C libraries; Rust, by contrast, is fast and memory-efficient, has great tooling, and is easier for Python developers to learn. The article also invited readers to apply for a BCV event on Rust, data, and Python in San Francisco on February 9, to be joined by Polars founder Ritchie Vink and others.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5]

BCV recorded a “History of Diffusion” interview series with Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Yang Song, and Sander Dieleman, authors of early papers on diffusion models. Stich also published a primer on diffusion background to help listeners understand the research history and technical details discussed in the interviews.⁠[6][6]

BCV announced an investment in Periodic, an AI lab designed to accelerate scientific discovery. In an accompanying article, Stich used Galileo’s discovery of Jupiter’s moons with the telescope and the discovery of high-temperature superconductors as examples to discuss which bottlenecks to scientific discovery AI can remove; one of Periodic’s initial areas of focus is materials science.⁠[7][7][7][7][7]

As of October 2026, his investments at BCV include quantum computing company Oratomic (2026, early stage), generative AI image model company Black Forest Labs (2025, growth stage), Periodic Labs (2025, seed stage), data API company Structify (2025, seed stage), developer platform Northflank (2024, early stage), and Polars (2023, seed stage).⁠[1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1][1]

Bain Capital Ventures: Official website: https://baincapitalventures.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[1]

X: Public account: https://x.com/slaterstich (opens in a new window)⁠[1]

LinkedInLinkedInLinkedIn is a social networking platform for professionals. It was founded in 2002 by Reid Hoffman and others, launched in 2003, and listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2011; after Microsoft acquired it for approximately $26.2 billion in 2016, it became a wholly owned Microsoft subsidiary. Its revenue comes from membership subscriptions, advertising, and recruitment solutions.Open the full entry: Public profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slater-stich-4658a849/ (opens in a new window)⁠[1]