Felicis Ventures

The Felicis blog features perspectives from venture capital investors, operators, and founders on founder journeys, investment theses, innovation, and market shifts.

The company explains why it led Runlayer's Series A.

How Mercor’s Brendan Foody and Adarsh Hiremath are building the network for knowledge

Aydin Senkut is the founder and managing partner of Felicis, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that backs companies across AI, infrastructure, and health. Senkut was an early Google executive and the company’s first product manager.

James Detweiler is a General Partner at Felicis. He has invested in Mercor, Skild AI, Deepjudge, Predibase, Ricursive Intelligence, Flower Labs, Cambridge Terahertz and many other companies.

Peter Deng is a General Partner at Felicis, investing in companies unlocking new possibilities for consumers and businesses with AI. He invests up and down the stack and across verticals, bringing an operator’s lens to help founders see around corners at key inflection points.

As a Managing Partner and founding member of Felicis, Sundeep led Felicis' investments in several companies such as Mercor, Coalition, Plaid, and Komodo Health, as well as the following companies that have gone public: Ginkgo Bioworks, Matterport, Recursion Pharma, and Wish.

Felicis is a venture capital firm that backs founders building companies. Since 2006, Felicis says it has helped create $285B+ in value through a founder-first approach from seed to scale.

Felicis is a venture capital firm that backs iconic founders starting at Seed. Early believers in Notion, Canva, Shopify, n8n, Supabase, Mercor, and more.

The company says it believes in founders with imagination, courage, and discipline.

Prime Intellect acquires Moondream, a Seattle-founded startup that makes small, open-source image-understanding models. Its co-founders Jay Allen and Vik Korrapati join Prime Intellect to lead inference work and expand its efforts in vision and computer-using AI agents. Moondream’s Photon inference engine compiles each model into a GPU megakernel to reduce idle time between tasks. Prime Intellect keeps the Moondream name for efficient models and offers its latest model, Moondream 3.1, through its inference service.

Oct 2026 · GeekWireNews article

Arena raises a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. The company began as a UC Berkeley research project and runs a free crowdsourced platform where users compare AI models by rating their responses. Its commercial AI Evaluations service gives model labs and enterprises performance analytics based on community feedback, and Arena has added an alignment category to its leaderboard.

Oct 2026 · TechCrunchNews article

Luminal raises $5.3 million in seed funding to optimize the compiler software that connects written code to GPU hardware. Felicis Ventures leads the round, with angel investments from Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch, and Ben Porterfield. The company sells compute and focuses on optimization techniques to get more out of its infrastructure, targeting demand for faster and cheaper AI inference.

Nov 2025 · TechCrunchNews article

Mercor raises $350 million in a Series C at a $10 billion valuation to connect AI labs with domain experts who train foundational AI models. Felicis Ventures leads the round, with Benchmark, General Catalyst, and new investor Robinhood Ventures participating. The company provides experts such as scientists, doctors, and lawyers for model training, and is adding reinforcement-learning infrastructure. It says it has more than 30,000 experts and pays contractors over $1.5 million per day.

Oct 2025 · TechCrunchNews article