Plaid Matrix Fund is a Carnegie Mellon Universityâbacked seed and pre-seed venture fund investing in exceptional Carnegie Mellon founders across computing, robotics, AI, and engineering.
Carnegie Mellon University is one of the worldâs most concentrated sources of technical talent and innovation. Plaid Matrix Fund works closely with the CMU entrepreneurship ecosystem â including VentureBridge, the Swarts Center for Entrepreneurship, and the universityâs alumni and research network â to help founders turn technical insight into category-defining companies.
Partnering with exceptional technical founders to build category-defining companies
Plaid Matrix Fund partners with exceptional Carnegie Mellon founders at the earliest stages of company formation. We support founders with aligned capital, experienced guidance, and access to the broader venture ecosystemâso technically ambitious ideas can grow into durable, category-defining companies.
Plaid Matrix Fund provides fast, founder-friendly seed and pre-seed capital to Carnegie Mellonâaffiliated teams. Initial investments typically range from $100K to $500K, allowing founders to move quickly while staying focused on building. We invest early, with conviction, and with a long-term orientation around exceptional technical talent.
Founders work directly with the General Partners and a trusted network of Carnegie Mellon alumni, operators, and investors who have built and supported dozens of early-stage companies. Our partnership is practical and hands-on, focused on product strategy, fundraising, hiring, and early go-to-market executionâtailored to the needs of technically driven teams.
Plaid Matrix Fund helps founders build trusted relationships beyond the University. Through deep connections across the national venture and technology ecosystemâparticularly in San Francisco and New Yorkâwe facilitate high-quality introductions to investors, partners, and customers as companies prepare to scale.
Plaid Matrix Fund partners with early-stage companies building innovative products across computing, robotics, AI, and engineering. Below are select companies we are proud to support.
Coheso builds AI-driven workflow software for in-house legal teams, enabling faster responses to routine questions and improving efficiency on more complex legal work. Co-founder Manish Agnihotri holds a Masterâs degree in IT Strategy from Carnegie Mellon University.
Manish Agnihotri
Co-founder
CMU Masters â22
April is a YC Summer â25 and VentureBridge â25 company building a voice-powered personal assistant to help people manage calendars and inboxes on the go. Co-founder Neha Suresh is a 2024 Carnegie Mellon masterâs alumna.
Neha Suresh
Co-founder
CMU Masters â24
Clear Solar is a VentureBridge â25 company commercializing dust-remediation technology originally developed by NASA for use on terrestrial solar panels. Co-founder and CEO Michael Provenzano is a 2018 Tepper MBA alumnus
Michael Provenzano
Co-founder and CEO
CMU Masters â18
Boost Robotics is a YC Spring â25 company building robots for data center environmentsâan increasingly critical and under-automated market. The company was co-founded by Hardik Singh (CIT â19, SCS â23) and Hans Kumar (CIT â19, âšSCS â23).
Hardik Singh
Co-founder
CMU SCS â23
Hans Kumar
Co-founder
CMU SCS â23
Powerline is managing fixed site large scale batteries for the grid with Battery CoPilot. Battery CoPilot gives trading signals and tuning advice for the batteries, independent of the battery vendor. Founders Matineh Eybpoosh and Julian
Lamy have completed PhD’s from CMU.
Matineh Eybpoosh
Co-founder
CMU PhD ’15
Julian Lamy
Co-founder
CMU PhD ,19
Terrabyte is building an “earth search engine” powered by a proprietary geospatial foundation model that converts petabytes imagery into searchable embeddings. The company was co-founded by Rishi Madhok, who holds a Master’s in Computer Vision from the Robotics Institute.
Rishi Madhok
Founder
CMU Masters ’19
Experienced operators with deep Carnegie Mellon roots
Plaid Matrix Fund is led by two Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science alumni with decades of experience building, scaling, and investing in technically ambitious companies. The General Partners bring complementary backgrounds as founders, operators, and early-stage investors, along with a shared commitment to supporting the next generation of Carnegie Mellon entrepreneurs.
Jonathan Betz is a New York Cityâbased technology executive and investor with degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Carnegie Mellon University. An early Google employee, he led some of the companyâs first efforts to extract structured data from the open web for use in search and later held senior engineering leadership roles at high-growth companies including Yext and Rent the Runway. From early 2023 through late 2024, he was co-founder and COO of Continua AI, backed by GV and Bessemer Venture Partners, and over the past 15 years has invested in more than 40 pre-seed startups, including Lucid Software, Mortar Data (acquired by Datadog), Remix (acquired by Via), Materia AI (acquired by Thomson Reuters), and Stellic.
Combined experience within the top technology companies and innovative technology start-ups.
The partners have made pre-seed investments in over one hundred start-ups in the past fifteen years.
The combined valuation of companies that Michael and Jonathan have invested in.
Apply to see how Plaid Matrix Fund can support your companyâs growth.
