AJ

Aaron Jacobson

Director at Second Front Systems

San Francisco, California

Overview 

Aaron Jacobson is a Partner at NEA in San Francisco, with a background in venture capital, investments, and M&A. He has successfully invested in companies like Pulumi, Embrace, and Bitglass, focusing on sectors such as Cleantech and Cybersecurity, and has an educational background in Economics and Engineering from The Wharton School and University of Pennsylvania. Aaron Jacobson's career highlights include his role as a Partner at NEA, where he leads investments in Series A and Series B companies in sectors like ClimateTech and AI, and his successful investments in companies like Pulumi and Bitglass, contributing to their growth and success.

Work Experience 

  • Partner

    2011 - Current

    My focus is on AI / ML, developer tools, cybersecurity, cloud / data / app infrastructure, and robotics I currently serve as a director of Second Front, Flox, Crowdbotics, Embrace, Rapid Robotics, Pulumi, Deltastream, Outrider, ForAllSecure, Tigera, and Juvo. I also serve as a Board Observer at Databricks and work closely with other portfolio companies such as Martian, Antimatter, and Built Robotics. Previous investments include Streamsets (Acq. by Software AG), Box (NYSE:Box), NGINX (Acq. by F5), and illusive networks (Acq. by Proofpoint). Other investment experiences includes: Bloom Energy, Coursera, BlockCypher, CareZone, CCP Games, Cohere Technologies, Gainspeed, GuideSpark, Hyperpilot, iopipe, Igneous Systems, Kumu Networks, Lattice Engines, Luminate Wireless, Mimosa Networks, Psikick, Silk, Stormpath, and Transfix.

New Enterprise Associates is a venture capital firm that focuses on investments in technology and healthcare startups.

  • Participating VC

    2020

    Talent is everywhere, but opportunity is not. Advancing racial equity in venture capital means making space for diverse teams and leaders and funding real progress in our industry. I'm committed to changing this system with the help of my peers, and joined a community of investors in an initiative committing dedicated time every week to meet with underrepresented founders and encourage you to reach out. Learn more and sign-up here: https://www.vcopendoor.com/

  • Director

    2023

    Second Front Systems (2F) fast-tracks government access to disruptive, commercially-proven software as a service (SaaS) applications for national security missions. Leading software providers—ranging from publicly traded defense contractors to startups—and global government agencies trust 2F's Game Warden DevSecOps platform and secure cloud hosting environment to accelerate their delivery and harness the cloud revolution at scale. For more information, visit https://secondfront.com.

  • Director

    2023

    flox brings the power of Nix to everyone by offering the first end-to-end solution that empowers teams to accelerate and simplify their Systems Development Life Cycle. flox is the secure way to manage and deploy software in isolated and reproducible development or runtime environments. For more information, please visit:

Flox offers developers, platform engineers, and operators reproducible environments that span the enterprise SDLC. Bringing Nix to Work!

Raised $23,921,027.00 from Guy Podjarny, New Enterprise Associates, Addition, Thomas Dohmke, Tapestry VC, Aaron Applbaum, James Turnbull and Hetz Ventures.

  • Director

    2022

    Crowdbotics makes it faster than ever to build complete, scalable apps for business. With Crowdbotics, professionals can turn ideas into real code using a matched library of components and a network of on-call experts. Crowdbotics references a library of millions of production-grade software packages to identify the most effective components and workflows for a given project. Crowdbotics then handles infrastructure, implementation, maintenance, operations, monitoring, and security for the life of the project.

Crowdbotics uses generative AI and reusable code to radically accelerate the software development lifecycle.

Raised $60,066,243.00 from Harrison Metal, New Enterprise Associates, Cooley, The House Fund, Jackson Square Ventures, Homebrew and Bee Partners.

  • Director

    2021

    Embrace's mission is to transform all companies to mobile by empowering them to deliver incredible mobile experiences. Embrace is the only observability and data platform built for mobile. With Embrace, teams proactively uncover, prioritize, and instantly solve issues before they affect a business' bottom line. More than 100 organizations worldwide — and many of the world's best mobile companies — including Hyatt, GOAT, Glo, Depop, Dave, and ChowNow, use Embrace to proactively optimize their mobile experiences.

Embrace helps mobile engineers build better experiences.

Raised $77,000,000.00 from AV8 Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Eniac Ventures and Greycroft.

  • Director

    2021

    Rapid Robotics is the creator of the first affordable robotic machine operator designed for simple machine tasks. Available for just $25K a year and requiring absolutely no programming, systems integration, specialized hardware or robotics skills, the Rapid Machine Operator enables manufacturers to easily deploy a pre-trained cobot in hours, moving it between tasks as needed and seeing ROI in months. Rapid Robotics’ founding team combines robotics and manufacturing expertise with a SaaS business model to deliver affordable solutions to real-world industry problems. Investors include NEA, Greycroft, Bee Partners and 468 Capital. The company is based in San Francisco, California.

Rapid Robotics provides risk-free robotic palletizing solutions for manufacturing and logistics.

Raised $54,200,000.00 from 468 Capital, New Enterprise Associates, Tiger Global Management, Bee Partners, Kleiner Perkins and Greycroft.

  • Director

    2020

    Internet users today expect tailored, real-time digital interactions online and delivering these experiences requires processing data at millisecond speeds. Failure to keep up results in lower revenue due to unhappy or lost customers, and increased costs from an inability to catch downtime or fraud fast enough. Yet processing data in real time remains inaccessible to most businesses. Most of the existing solutions either process data in minutes or hours since they are batch-based or they require expensive, specialized teams to deploy and scale. DeltaStream solves this challenge with a cloud-native, real-time stream processing solution that is easy to use and automatically scalable while still remaining cost-effective.

DeltaStream is a real-time stream processing platform that includes streaming analytics and database features.

Raised $25,000,000.00 from Sanabil, Galaxy Interactive and New Enterprise Associates.

  • Director

    2020

    Pulumi's modern infrastructure as code platform empowers cloud engineering teams to work better together to ship faster with confidence, using open source and the world’s most popular programming languages. Pulumi’s SaaS product enables a consistent workflow for delivering and securing applications and infrastructure on any cloud—public, private, or hybrid—including AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes and more than 50 other cloud infrastructure providers. Organizations of all sizes, from startups to the Global 2000, have chosen Pulumi for their cloud transformation and modernization needs. Pulumi was founded in 2017 by Microsoft, Amazon and Google software veterans.

Pulumi is a cloud engineering company that offers a way to build, connect, and run modern cloud applications.

Raised $98,500,000.00 from New Enterprise Associates, Tola Capital, Strike Capital and Madrona.

  • Director

    2018

    Outrider, the pioneer in autonomous yard operations for logistics hubs, helps large enterprises improve safety and increase efficiency. The only company exclusively focused on automating all aspects of yard operations, Outrider eliminates manual tasks that are hazardous and repetitive. Outrider's mission is to drive the rapid adoption of sustainable freight transportation by deploying zero-emission systems. Outrider is a private company backed by NEA, 8VC, and other top-tier investors.

Outrider develops robotic software and systems to automate logistics hub operations.

Raised $253,000,000.00 from Interwoven Ventures, Koch Disruptive Technologies, ARK Investment Management, Presidio Ventures, 8VC, NVentures, Service Provider Capital, B37 Ventures, New Enterprise Associates and Prologis Ventures.

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