1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Lisa Chai, General Partner at Interwoven Ventures (Part 1)

Lisa Chai, Co-founder and General Partner at Interwoven Ventures, discusses her firm’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Today, we are going to start the session with the conversation with Lisa Chai, General Partner of Interwoven Ventures. Lisa, welcome to the show.

Lisa Chai: Thanks for having me.

Sramana Mitra: This is my first conversation with Lisa. So, I would love to get to know you a little bit. If you could introduce yourself – a bit of your background and then a bit of the firm’s background for the benefit of our audience, that’ll be great.

Lisa Chai: Yes, definitely. I’m Lisa Chai, co-founder and general partner. I co-lead the firm’s investment activities. I have over two decades of investing experience in both public and private markets, where I was a senior vice president and portfolio manager for several companies, including ROBO Global, Gordon Private Equity Firm, and the Palisade Capital’s emerging growth funds where I was responsible for industrial and technology sectors.

Interwoven, the company I co-founded, is an early-stage venture fund, investing in the field of robotics and AI with an emphasis on foundational industries going through major labor shortages. We invest in Seed to Series B companies across multiple sectors such as manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and healthcare tech, where we believe that robotics and AI are making the biggest impact today and will experience that sustained period of growth that we’re looking for.

I started my tech investing journey even when I was a kid watching science fiction movies; and in college, I became a computer programmer. I’ve always been a very big finance geek. I read a lot of books, even books on Excel spreadsheet. I got a lucky break working on Wall Street, working for a hedge fund covering technology sector and consumer before moving on to PE and VC.

I’ve always been sort of fascinated by technology, watching movies like Star Wars and really been reading on the side of all these disruptive technologies, whether it’s blockchain, climate tech technologies, or AI.

I’ve been very involved in learning about AI for probably about 20 years now.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the Interwoven Ventures fund?

Lisa Chai: We are a small fund of just four investment people with AUM right now below $100 million. We began the VC journey when it was incubated under a larger established investment fund called ROBO Global, which was a $5 billion plus fund. It was founded in 2013 when we were the world’s first to launch a robotic strategy. At that time, nobody was doing that. It comprised of publicly traded companies.

As a team, we had been researching investing in this space and one of the close partners said, “Hey, why aren’t we investing in a private space?” So, we were incubated under them. We raised money through a close circle that followed Robo Global and the Robo Global entity. We launched the first fund in December 2021.  

Sramana Mitra: Okay. What size checks do you write when you write Seed checks? Well, let’s start with Seed because we are a very early-stage accelerator. Let’s start with Seed. What size checks do you write?

Lisa Chai: On the low end? About $100K. We’re pretty much of a seed investor rather than a first check investor. It’s somewhere between $100K-$500K for a seed round.

We do invest multiple times. We have several companies where they raise a seed round and they needed to do an extension of a seed round, and we participated. We’re very flexible in that sense. We do invest through convertible notes and many different ways; we work with the founders on that.

For Series A and B, we have written checks up to $3 million.