Khosla Ventures

Khosla Ventures is the firm Vinod Khosla founded after leaving Kleiner Perkins, and it carries his unmistakable thesis: high-conviction, high-ambition technical bets, often years before the consensus arrives, in domains including AI, energy, food, and healthcare. The firm has been one of the most prominent AI investors of the post-ChatGPT cycle, having been an early backer of OpenAI alongside a range of AI infrastructure and applications companies, and has been a long-standing healthcare investor with a portfolio that includes Devoted Health, Curai, Alivecor, Color, Nurix, and a deep bench of AI-in-healthcare and biotech bets. Khosla’s healthcare thesis is unusually expansive: the firm will invest in clinical AI, drug discovery, novel modalities, care delivery, diagnostics, and food-as-medicine, and the unifying theme is that the technology must be defensibly hard and the ambition must be category-defining. Stage focus is seed through growth, with a seed practice that writes one-to-three-million first checks (often as the only check at the very earliest stage, with Khosla as a true company-creator partner), Series A and B leads in the ten-to-thirty-million range, and growth checks that scale into the hundreds for breakout portfolio companies. Geography is Menlo Park-headquartered and US-centric, with selective international activity, particularly in India, where Vinod’s personal network is deep. Founders who should approach Khosla are technical founders, scientific founders, or clinically-credentialed founders with an ambitious, hard-tech thesis; the firm will fund pre-revenue and pre-product companies on the strength of the team and the science, and it is one of the few firms that will write a meaningful first check into a true zero-to-one bet. Founders who should look elsewhere are operationally-led founders running incremental businesses, services-heavy businesses without a technology wedge, or founders who want a passive, quiet investor. The entry path that works best is a warm intro through a portfolio CEO or through one of the firm’s partners; Vinod and his partners (Samir Kaul, Alex Morgan, Jon Friedland, Kristina Simmons, and others) are accessible by industry standards, but warm signals matter. When you pitch, lead with the technical or scientific bet and the founder’s reason to believe; Khosla pitches typically include a sharp, opinionated discussion led by Vinod or the relevant partner, and founders who hold their ground on substance while engaging with the questions tend to do well. Caveats: Khosla is famously hands-on and famously direct; founders who are not comfortable with sharp-edged feedback in board meetings should consider whether the partnership fit will work for them over the seven-to-ten-year horizon of a venture relationship; the firm has had a long history of being willing to walk away from companies that miss the strategic mark, so the relationship is high-engagement but not unconditional; valuations are competitive but not the highest in the market, because Khosla is buying conviction, not buying around it.