This Early Groq Investor Expects Half Her Bets To Fail

What happened

She later became a general partner at Social Capital , where she led early institutional investments in AI chipmaker Groq , and later invested at Khosla Ventures . In an interview with Crunchbase News, Sandhya Venkatachalam, founder and managing partner of Axiom Partners, discusses why she looks beyond familiar founder profiles, what makes an AI company durable, and how an early investment in Groq shaped her approach.

She led product at an early data center hardware company that was sold to Cisco , then became a product executive at Skype before its sale to Microsoft . Those roles brought her into data and machine learning years before AI became venture capital’s dominant theme. Now she’s founder and managing partner of Axiom Partners , a $52 million fund backing startups that use AI to do work in industries such as construction, industrials and insurance.