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 Swartz 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 the most recent companies we support.
ProcIndex is developing AI accounting agents, specialized for the construction and manufacturing verticals. The company is a YC Summer â25 and VentureBridge â25 participant. Plaid Matrix invested $100K through a SAFE round at a $23M valuation cap.
Proxon is building a management layer for any AI workforce, mapping the AI systems already running across the company, assigning ownership and policy, tying spend to teams and outcomes, measuring adoption and performance, and helping effective workflows spread.
Perforated is creating the data-efficiency layer for machine learning that helps teams build smaller, more accurate models using less training data. Plaid Matrix invested $150K.
Oryn AI is building a physics-aware perception layer that converts 2D visual input into structured 3D representations usable by robotic systems. $500K invested in a priced round with a post-money valuation of $20M.
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.
