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Vinay Iyengar
VC at Bessemer
Vinay Iyengar is a prominent venture capitalist currently serving as a Partner at Foundation Capital, where he leads early-stage investments in enterprise software and data/machine learning infrastructure. Before this role, he worked at Two Sigma Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners, where he focused on early and growth-stage investments, particularly in enterprise software, machine learning, marketplaces, and developer tools.124
Background and Career
Vinay Iyengar graduated from Harvard University in 2018 and began his career at Bessemer Venture Partners, one of the oldest venture capital firms in the U.S. During his time there, he was instrumental in sourcing and supporting investments in various successful startups, including PagerDuty and Auth0. He also founded and co-led the firm's diversity and inclusion committee, which included the establishment of the Bessemer Fellowship Program aimed at promoting diversity in the tech ecosystem.234
In addition to his investment roles, Vinay has a background in technology as a math researcher and software engineer. He has also had entrepreneurial experience, having co-founded a startup focused on improving email and task management through natural language processing.23
Contributions and Focus
Vinay is known for his commitment to fostering diversity and inclusion within the startup community. His work in this area has been recognized and supported by various organizations, further emphasizing his dedication to helping mission-driven founders build innovative technology companies.124
Overall, Vinay Iyengar's career reflects a blend of technological expertise, investment acumen, and a strong commitment to social impact within the venture capital landscape.
Highlights
Some people grind for years - sourcing deals, helping founders, building community - in order to break into VC.
And others choke a homeless man to death on the subway.
SMFH.
https://t.co/wcS79ux3ao
In the past 12 months, EdTech has quietly gone from a 4-letter word in the tech community to one of the most exciting categories for founders and investors. This is all thanks to breakthroughs in generative AI. Here are a few very exciting anecdotes of how education is already being transformed:
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MagicSchool AI, which helps teachers make lesson plans and assessments, is now used by over 2.5m teachers (most of whom are based in the US). This means that of the ~4m teachers in the US, likely more than half have used the product, in just over a year since launch. This would make it the fastest-growing product in the history of edtech. Unreal execution by Adeel Khan, a former school principal-turned-founder. He is also representative of the rise of "domain expert founders" as opposed to those who are tech insiders.
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Andrej Karpathy, who is one of the leading minds in AI today, recently decided to leave OpenAI to start Eureka Labs. While not a lot is public, the aim of the company is to create an entirely new school that is AI-native. Their first plan is to launch an undergrad-level AI course called LLM101n that teaches students to train their own LLM and guides them with an AI-enabled teacher's assistant.
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AI-based personalized tutors are starting to achieve parity with human tutors. Anecdotally, I have heard that 4th graders in Baltimore City public schools are starting to learn math entirely via personalized AI tutors. This is a mind-blowing advancement and thanks to some of the brightest alums from top tech companies building products like Atypical AI and Kyron Learning. There are at least 55,000 teacher vacancies and growing in the US alone; the possibility of high-quality, AI-based teaching tools is very exciting.
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Finally, Khan Academy is in the early phases of building a number of very exciting (and hopefully fully free) AI-enabled tools, for teachers, students, and parents from underserved communities. Most recently, they launched Khanmigo, an AI-based lesson planner that they have made 100% free for teachers. With 250m out-of-school students worldwide and widespread budget cuts in public school systems, we are in desperate need of non-profits like Khan Academy to help close the achievement gap.
