4 Trends for AI Startups and Generative AI Companies | NEA
Talks about generative AI, startup company-building and Perplexity AI
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 Veza, 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 with other portfolio companies such as Martian 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.
Board Observer
2014
Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Apache Spark™, Delta Lake and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world's toughest problems.
Databricks is an AI cloud data platform that interacts with corporate information stored in the public cloud.
Raised $3,997,000,000.00 from Firestreak Ventures and Bossa Invest.
Director
2025
Veza is the leader in identity security, helping organizations secure access across the enterprise. Veza’s Access Platform goes beyond identity governance and administration (IGA) tools to visualize, monitor, and control entitlements so that organizations can stay compliant and achieve least privilege. Global enterprises like Wynn Resorts, Expedia, and Blackstone trust Veza to manage identity security use cases, including privileged access monitoring, non-human identity (NHI) security, access entitlement management, data system access, SaaS access security, IAM hygiene, identity security posture management (ISPM), and next-generation IGA. Founded in 2020, Veza is headquartered in Los Gatos, California, and is funded by Accel, Bain Capital, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures (GV), NEA, Norwest Venture Partners, and True Ventures.
Veza is a data security platform that helps users use and share their data safely.
Raised $125,000,000.00 from The Syndicate Group.
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.
Investor
2023
Martian built the first model router, backed by $9M from NEA, General Catalyst, CVP, and Prosus Ventures. You can think of us like Google for LLMs: every time you send us a request, we automatically find and use the LLM which will give you the best result at the lowest cost. Engineers at 300+ companies, from Amazon to Zapier, have used Martian to achieve higher performance and lower costs, with greater security and reliability. The team consists of previous AI researchers at Stanford, Harvard, University of Pennsylvania, the Google Bard Team, and Microsoft Research who have previously built and sold multiple NLP companies and published in the leading AI research journals.
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.
Education
B.S. in Economics
2005 - 2009
B.S. in Engineering
2005 - 2009
Investments
Latest Articles
Embracing the Future of Mobile Data | NEA
Talks about mobile technology, digital transformation and mobile data
Our Investment in Second Front: Strengthening America Through Software | NEA
Talks about investment in defense technology, venture capital in defense and Second Front
Outrider: Leading the Pack in Logistics Hub Automation | NEA
Talks about Autonomous Vehicles (AVs), Logistics Hub Automation and Yard Operations Automation