Foundation Capital

Foundation Capital was founded in 1995 as an early-stage venture capital firm. One of its co-founders, Kathryn Gould, is a 1978 graduate of the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, which gave her its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2005.⁠[1][2]

In 1999 Foundation Capital backed Netflix, then a DVD-by-mail service.⁠[1]

Foundation Capital’s flagship fund was $750 million in 2008; the flagship fund it raised in 2013 was scaled down to $282 million.⁠[3]

In 2010 general partner Ashu Garg helped TubeMogul, an early-stage BerkeleyUniversity of California, BerkeleyThe University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley) is a campus of the University of California system; the University of California was founded in 1868 through a merger of two institutions and moved to Berkeley, California, in 1873.Open the full entry-based analytics company, move into the media-buying platform business. TubeMogul went public in 2014 and was acquired by AdobeAdobeAdobe (Adobe Inc.) is a software company headquartered in San Jose, California, founded in 1982 by John Warnock and Charles Geschke. Known for PostScript, PDF and creative software such as Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects, it moved its main creative products to Creative Cloud subscriptions from 2013 and expanded into digital marketing and generative AI; it is listed on Nasdaq under the ticker ADBE.Open the full entry in 2016.⁠[4]

In April 2016 Foundation Capital wrote the first term sheet for Cerebras. A few weeks later CerebrasCerebrasCerebras Systems is an AI computing company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, known for its Wafer-Scale Engine chips, which turn an entire silicon wafer into a single processor, and for the CS-series systems and inference cloud services built on them. Founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman and four other co-founders, it depended heavily on Abu Dhabi’s G42 for revenue in its early years, shifted from 2025 toward high-speed inference for customers such as OpenAI and AWS, and listed on Nasdaq in May 2026 under the ticker CBRS.Open the full entry moved into Foundation Capital’s entrepreneur-in-residence space on the second floor of 250 Middlefield, where the company got its start.⁠[5][3]

In 2024 Charles Moldow, who spent nearly 20 years at Foundation Capital and backed LendingClub, Rappi and Kiavi, retired.⁠[3]

On March 4, 2025, Foundation Capital announced a $600 million eleventh flagship fund, about 20% larger than its $500 million predecessor closed roughly three years earlier. The firm focuses on seed and early-stage investing, is the first institutional investor in more than 70% of its portfolio companies, and aims to own 15% to 20% of a company at its first investment.⁠[3]

General partner Steve Vassallo said: “We look for what I call ‘$0 billion’ markets in enterprise, AI, fintech and crypto.” The firm then had four general partners and had returned about $1.4 billion to limited partners over the previous three years. It was the first institutional investor in SolanaSolanaSolana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) public blockchain designed for high throughput and low latency, with SOL as its native token; it was developed by Solana Labs and launched Mainnet Beta in March 2020. It is known for design choices such as its Proof of History clock and parallel execution, suffered several network-wide outages in its early years, and became one of the crypto industry’s focal points in events including the FTX collapse, U.S. SEC lawsuits, and the listing of Solana ETFs.Open the full entry; portfolio company EvolutionIQ was sold to CCC for $730 million, and Venafi was acquired by CyberArk for $1.5 billion.⁠[3]

When Cerebras listed on NasdaqNasdaqNasdaq is an exchange operator and financial technology company headquartered in New York. It runs The Nasdaq Stock Market and other markets and provides capital markets technology, regulatory technology, and data and index services. Founded in 1971, it combined with OMX AB in 2008, and in March 2026 the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved its rules for trading tokenized securities.Open the full entry in May 2026, Vassallo published a retrospective on Foundation Capital’s decade with the company, writing: “This morning, Andrew rang the bell at NASDAQ,” referring to Cerebras co-founder Andrew Feldman.⁠[5]

Foundation Capital says it has run more than a dozen funds with over $3 billion in committed capital, and that its portfolio has produced 34 IPOs and ICOs and more than 80 acquisitions; its investments include Solana, Lending Club, Sunrun, TubeMogul and Netflix. It led the investment in Atheros, which developed the wireless technology behind WiFi and was later acquired by QualcommQualcommQualcomm is a semiconductor and wireless technology company headquartered in San Diego, California. Founded in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs and six other former Linkabit colleagues, it built its business on CDMA technology and now rests on two pillars: its Snapdragon chip platforms and the licensing of cellular standard-essential patents. It has faced antitrust investigations and litigation in many jurisdictions, and in recent years has expanded into automotive, IoT, PCs and AI data centers.Open the full entry, and invested in UberUberUber is a technology company headquartered in San Francisco, United States, whose legal name is Uber Technologies, Inc. Co-founded by Garrett Camp and Travis Kalanick, it uses digital platforms to connect riders with drivers, delivery consumers with merchants, and shippers with carriers, with main businesses in Mobility, Delivery, and Freight. Dara Khosrowshahi has been chief executive officer since 2017.Open the full entry about a decade later.⁠[1]

The firm says the mark in its logo is not an F but the Kryptonian symbol for “resilience.”⁠[1]

Foundation Capital’s general partners are Steve Vassallo, Ashu Garg, Joanne Chen and Rodolfo Gonzalez, and it has offices in Palo Alto and San Francisco.⁠[6][4][7][8][1]

Vassallo spent the first five years of his career designing products at IDEO and joined Foundation Capital in 2007 from the social platform Ning; he co-leads the firm’s crypto practice. He led the firm’s investments in companies including Stripe, Sunrun, Cerebras Systems and Control4, and co-led its investments in Solana and Brave.⁠[6]

Garg is an early investor in Databricks and in Cohesity, Eightfold, Amperity, Turing, Anyscale and Alation. Chen joined Foundation Capital in 2014 after working as an engineer at Cisco SystemsCiscoCisco Systems, Inc. is an American networking technology company, incorporated in 1984, headquartered in San Jose, California, and listed on Nasdaq.Open the full entry and at Jefferies & Company and Probitas Partners.⁠[4][7]

Foundation Capital: Official website: https://foundationcapital.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

X: Public account: https://x.com/FoundationCap (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

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/company/foundation-capital/ (opens in a new window).⁠[9]

YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry: Public channel: https://www.youtube.com/@foundation-capital (opens in a new window).⁠[9]