Essence VC

Essence Venture Capital is a venture capital investment firm established in 2019 and based in Seattle, Washington. The firm focuses on supporting technical founders as they develop their startups, guiding them through the early stages of their business journeys. Essence Venture Capital invests in a variety of sectors, including information technology, big data, data infrastructure, development tools, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. Its investment strategy spans multiple regions, including the United States, Canada, Europe, Asia, and Africa, reflecting a commitment to fostering innovation across diverse markets.
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Timothy Chen

General Partner

36 past transactions

Gable

Series A in 2025
Gable is a business-to-business data infrastructure software-as-a-service company that provides a platform aimed at enhancing collaboration through the writing and execution of data contracts. This platform facilitates effective communication between data providers and consumers, promoting improved data quality on a larger scale. Additionally, Gable offers a management platform focused on enhancing data visibility and governance. By employing artificial intelligence, Gable's platform scans code to identify data creation points, monitor its movement, and assess its effects prior to deployment. This comprehensive approach helps organizations prevent disruptions, fosters collaboration, and ensures compliance with relevant standards.

OpenInfer

Seed Round in 2025
OpenInfer specializes in developing an AI inference engine tailored for edge applications. This engine empowers businesses to create intelligent agents and workflows that function on diverse hardware, ensuring data privacy, reducing costs, and providing reliable, long-chain reasoning capabilities.

Nuon

Series A in 2024
Nuon is a developer of cloud applications that enables businesses to operate their software on customers' cloud accounts. The company focuses on creating fully self-managing cloud environments by handling the deployment, updates, and ongoing management of operations. This approach provides businesses with a control plane that allows application builders to debug applications, access logs, monitor metrics, and receive alerts. Additionally, Nuon's platform facilitates the execution of operational commands in a secure and auditable manner, ensuring the integrity of customer data from a centralized dashboard.

Fiddler AI

Series B in 2024
Fiddler Labs, Inc. is a company that specializes in developing an artificial intelligence platform designed to help businesses analyze, manage, and deploy their machine learning models effectively. Founded in 2018 and headquartered in Palo Alto, California, Fiddler offers an Explainable AI Engine that promotes transparency and understanding in AI solutions. This platform allows users across data science, product, and business teams to comprehend, validate, and manage their AI implementations, ensuring that these systems deliver reliable and trustworthy experiences for end-users. By providing statistical metrics, performance monitoring, and centralized controls, Fiddler aims to make AI more accessible and trustworthy for enterprises, ultimately unlocking the complexities of AI and enhancing user confidence in its applications.

Genmo

Series A in 2024
Genmo is a technology company that develops an artificial intelligence platform for creative content generation. Its platform enables users to create high-quality videos, images, and 3D models using intuitive text and image prompts, leveraging advanced natural language processing technology. This allows video creators to generate custom visual media and produce cinematic video content with the assistance of AI.

Distributional

Series A in 2024
Distributional develops an adaptive testing platform for enterprise AI applications. It offers tools for continuous monitoring, generating test cases, and analyzing results to ensure artificial intelligence systems function reliably and securely.

Letta

Seed Round in 2024
Letta is a technology company that specializes in memory management solutions for artificial intelligence (AI) models. It offers two primary products: Hosted Cloud and Lett_API. Hosted Cloud is a scalable service that creates, deploys, and manages agents in the cloud, while Lett_API enhances language learning models with reasoning capabilities and long-term memory storage, powered by MemGPT. Letta's platform provides accessible APIs, long-term data storage, and developer tools, enabling users to build and manage intelligent AI applications effectively.

LanceDB

Seed Round in 2024
LanceDB is an open-source database platform designed specifically for multimodal AI needs. It offers scalable vector search, advanced retrieval for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), streaming training data, and interactive exploration of large-scale datasets.

Teleskope

Seed Round in 2024
Teleskope provides a data protection platform that automates security and privacy management across digital ecosystems. The platform classifies both structured and unstructured data, detects and remediates privacy risks, and integrates with cloud environments and developer workflows. It supports compliance with global regulations and enables redaction, monitoring, and governance at scale, delivering improved visibility and safer data operations for enterprises and engineering teams across internal and third-party systems.

Log10

Seed Round in 2024
Log10 is a technology company that specializes in enhancing large language model (LLM) applications. It offers an AI-driven platform that optimizes LLM data management by tuning prompts and models, helping developers compare and improve their AI development processes.

Coana (acquired by Socket)

Pre Seed Round in 2024
Coana helps software teams tackle the flood of alerts from traditional SCA tools. By using advanced reachability analysis, Coana cuts false alerts by over 80%, freeing up significant engineering time without sacrificing security. Coana is developed by leading program analysis researchers and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Essence VC.

Unkey

Pre Seed Round in 2023
Unkey is an open-source platform specializing in API authentication and authorization. It enables developers to create, verify, and manage API keys with low latency, securing and scaling APIs efficiently.

Vera

Pre Seed Round in 2023
Vera develops an assessment platform to identify and address risks in artificial intelligence and machine learning models. It engages key stakeholders across teams to create data-driven assessments and use data science tools to investigate AI and ML models, helping organizations navigate through uncertainty and protecting companies and individuals from risky artificial intelligence systems.

Yurts Technologies

Series A in 2023
Yurts is a Generative AI platform designed for enterprise use. Its mission is to help individuals connect with their best work by revolutionizing knowledge management and enterprise processes at scale through the combination of Large Language Models (LLMs) and practical GenAI applications.

Gable

Seed Round in 2023
Gable is a business-to-business data infrastructure software-as-a-service company that provides a platform aimed at enhancing collaboration through the writing and execution of data contracts. This platform facilitates effective communication between data providers and consumers, promoting improved data quality on a larger scale. Additionally, Gable offers a management platform focused on enhancing data visibility and governance. By employing artificial intelligence, Gable's platform scans code to identify data creation points, monitor its movement, and assess its effects prior to deployment. This comprehensive approach helps organizations prevent disruptions, fosters collaboration, and ensures compliance with relevant standards.

Superframe

Seed Round in 2023
Superframe is an artificial intelligence-powered software company to assists organizations optimize go-to-market technology stacks. It accelerates revenue operations teams and support by removing the time, expense, and risk.

Abbey Labs

Seed Round in 2023
Abbey Labs is a developer of an access governance platform aimed at enhancing security for sensitive data. The company's solution automates the management of permissions, helping organizations limit risks associated with unauthorized access, particularly in the event of a data breach. By integrating access workflows such as requests and approvals into existing developer tools and infrastructure, Abbey enables security teams to streamline their compliance programs and maintain robust access controls. This approach allows engineers to automate access management processes, fostering a more secure environment for sensitive information.

Augmend

Pre Seed Round in 2023
Augmend develops a knowledge management platform that enhances team collaboration and information retention. It integrates with existing digital tools, uses AI for content categorization, offers real-time synchronization, contextual search, and seamless knowledge sharing to improve productivity.

Groundlight AI

Seed Round in 2023
Groundlight AI provides computer vision and machine-learning tools that let developers interpret images with natural-language prompts and minimal code, enabling rapid deployment of visual models. The platform is designed to ease integration into existing business logic by reducing the need for extensive data collection and training. When ambiguity occurs, low-confidence outputs are automatically escalated to more capable ML models and human experts through an assisted escalation workflow, ensuring higher accuracy. Groundlight blends traditional deep learning with real-time optimization and expert supervision to deliver customized, human-in-the-loop AI models that can become functional within minutes after a few lines of code.

Orb

Series A in 2023
Orb provides modern billing infrastructure powering revenue workflows for AI and software companies. Its platform supports real-time billing and usage-based pricing by handling the data infrastructure and billing logic needed for usage-based monetization, enabling companies to evolve their pricing towards more flexible models.

Sentio

Seed Round in 2023
Sentio is a company focused on accelerating the adoption of decentralized applications (DApps) by providing the crypto community with advanced infrastructure and developer tools. It operates an observability platform designed to enhance monitoring and log management for Web3 environments. The platform features variable-level smart contract monitoring, full-text and conditional event transaction search, as well as user-friendly dashboards and alerts. These services enable users to assess critical variable states within smart contracts and obtain real-time insights, thereby facilitating more efficient development and deployment of DApps.

Sec3

Seed Round in 2023
Sec3 specializes in blockchain security solutions and smart contract auditing. They offer round-the-clock transaction monitoring, advanced source code analysis using AI technologies, and comprehensive security assessments for both smart contracts and Web2 systems, enhancing security and accelerating market deployment.

Common Fate

Seed Round in 2022
Common Fate is a developer of a permission management framework designed to enhance cloud security and access management for critical applications. Founded on June 25, 2022, by Christopher Norman and Fraser Ricupero in Perth, Western Australia, the company focuses on simplifying and securing cloud identities. Its platform enables secure workflows by automating least privilege access controls and managing permissions across multi-account and multi-cloud environments. By providing lockdown and secure access controls over privileged assets, accounts, and sensitive data, Common Fate aims to optimize cloud security for developers while ensuring that high-velocity DevOps teams can operate efficiently without delays.

Nuon

Seed Round in 2022
Nuon is a developer of cloud applications that enables businesses to operate their software on customers' cloud accounts. The company focuses on creating fully self-managing cloud environments by handling the deployment, updates, and ongoing management of operations. This approach provides businesses with a control plane that allows application builders to debug applications, access logs, monitor metrics, and receive alerts. Additionally, Nuon's platform facilitates the execution of operational commands in a secure and auditable manner, ensuring the integrity of customer data from a centralized dashboard.

Immerok

Seed Round in 2022
Immerok is a company dedicated to enhancing the experience of building, running, and supporting Apache Flink in the cloud. Founded in 2022, it offers a fully managed cloud service that specializes in real-time stream processing applications, allowing developers to harness the power of real-time decision-making and automation. With a team of experts in Apache Flink, Immerok aims to empower companies to remain at the forefront of innovation by providing scalable and efficient solutions for stream processing.

Turso

Seed Round in 2022
Founded in 2021, Turso is an open-source Edge database that brings the developer experience of SQLite closer to users. It specializes in bringing data to multiple locations simultaneously, enhancing application personalization and scalability.

Heartex

Seed Round in 2022
Heartex develops a platform that helps companies build AI products by labeling datasets with pre-trained models. The platform trains AI models to label datasets and offers features such as unlimited projects, download annotations, hotkeys support, model integrations, templates, and a REST API. The company is based in San Francisco, California.

Graft

Pre Seed Round in 2022
Graft offers a modern AI platform that empowers data teams to create production-ready AI solutions with minimal effort. It leverages foundation models and requires no machine learning expertise, additional hiring, or infrastructure maintenance.

SeeMetrics

Seed Round in 2022
SeeMetrics offers a cybersecurity performance management platform for security leaders. It integrates security data, metrics, and business objectives into an intuitive interface, connecting with the entire security stack to deliver meaningful insights. This enables security leaders to proactively manage operations, measure capabilities, track progress, collaborate with non-security leaders, and make data-driven decisions.

You.com

Seed Round in 2021
You.com is an AI-powered search and productivity platform that uses advanced language models to deliver personalized responses and human-like interactions. The platform combines real-time search with privacy-focused browsing and multiple AI tools, enabling users to access accurate information, create content and code, and streamline decision-making. It supports tasks such as web search, content and image creation, and coding assistance through tools including YouChat, YouCode, YouWrite, and YouImagine. By integrating multiple AI models and prioritizing up-to-date information and citations, You.com aims to improve productivity while emphasizing data security and efficiency.

Continual

Seed Round in 2021
Continual is a developer of an operational artificial intelligence platform designed to enhance predictions related to customer churn and inventory forecasts. The platform connects seamlessly to existing cloud data warehouses, allowing users to leverage their data effectively. By utilizing machine learning technology, Continual operationalizes predictive models, minimizes data leakage, and offers essential operational tools. This enables clients to better manage and utilize their data, ultimately driving revenue, streamlining operations, and fostering innovative products and services without requiring complex engineering solutions.

Elotl

Seed Round in 2021
Elotl develops a serverless infrastructure platform for microservices. It offers a nodeless Kubernetes engine that enables clients to run applications cost-effectively, securely, and cloud-agnostically without managing servers or clusters on the public cloud.

Devron

Venture Round in 2020
Devron is a data science product platform established in 2020 by Kartik Chopra in North Brunswick, New Jersey. The company aims to democratize machine learning across distributed data silos by utilizing federated machine learning and advanced privacy technologies. This approach allows users to access and analyze data in its original location, mitigating the costs, time, and risks associated with duplicating data in centralized storage. By facilitating direct access to data, Devron enables clients to accelerate their decision-making processes and enhance the generalizability of their models, all while upholding the privacy of the underlying data sources and methodologies.

Datafold

Seed Round in 2020
Datafold is a software company that automates analytical data quality management. Its platform enables instant table comparisons, data profiling, and automated validation of ETL changes and data transfers. It supports monitoring and QA across data pipelines and integrates with data engineering workflows to streamline data quality processes. The goal is to help organizations extract more value from analytical data by ensuring accuracy, consistency, and reliability of data used for analytics and decision-making. Founded in 2020 and based in San Francisco, California, Datafold provides tools that simplify data QA and automate data engineering tasks.

LaunchNotes

Seed Round in 2020
LaunchNotes is a business that specializes in product change communication software. Its platform aims to enhance customer experiences by keeping teams and users informed about upcoming product modifications. The company's solution centralizes all release communications in one accessible location, allowing businesses to receive regular updates tailored to specific workstreams, versions, teams, or organizational structures. This enables entire organizations to keep pace with their development teams' rapid software shipping cycles, ensuring no one is caught off guard by product changes.
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