James Alcorn

Partner at Lightspeed

📍 United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 15 investments📅 6 years investing🗓 Last invested Jan 2026
VC🌍 United States
15
Total investments
10
Early stage
1
Mid stage
0
Late stage
6y
Years active

Portfolio

15 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
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Mid stage
Late stage
Investor
2026
Inferact is a startup founded by creators and core maintainers of vLLM, the most popular open-source LLM inference engine. Our mission is to grow vLLM as the worlds AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster.
Investor
2025
Were building AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to operate. Join us: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs
Investor
2025
Were an AI research company that builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Our first product is Claude, an AI assistant for tasks at any scale. Our research interests span multiple areas including natural language, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability.
Investor
2025
Created by researchers from UC Berkeley, Arena (formerly LMArena) is a community-powered platform to measure and advance the frontier of AI for real-world use. Tens of millions of builders, researchers, and creative professionals come to Arena to use frontier models and give feedback on their responses, shaping a public leaderboard grounded in real-world use.
Investor
2025
Virtue AI sets the standard for advanced AI security platforms. Built on decades of foundational and award-winning research in AI security, its AI-native architecture unifies automated red-teaming, real-time multimodal guardrails, and policy-driven governance for enterprise agents, models, and apps. Virtue AI safeguards every MCP, input, and output—spanning text, code, image, video, and audio—in over 100 languages, detecting risks in sub-10 ms. Deploy in minutes across cloud, on-prem, or SaaS environments, or integrate directly with tools like ChatGPT and VS Code. With Virtue AI as your authenticated third-party partner, enterprises achieve unified visibility and assurance throughout the AI lifecycle—driving innovation without slowing performance.
Investor
2025
Judgment Labs builds agent behavior monitoring (ABM) infrastructure. Judgment provides a toolkit to track and judge agent behavior in online and offline setups, enabling you to convert high-signal interaction data from production/test environments into more reliable agents.
Investor
2024
Reflection is a research lab making intelligence open and accessible for everyone to use, customize, and build on. Our team previously built frontier LLMs at labs like DeepMind, OpenAI, and Anthropic. We believe AI should be built in the open, with transparent research and collaborative development. That means giving enterprises, governments, and sovereign entities true ownership and control of AI that performs at the highest level. Our mission: make intelligence open and accessible to all.
Investor
2024
Easily finetune & train LLMs. Get faster with unsloth.
Investor
2023
Factory is an AI research lab, bringing autonomy to software engineering with Droids.
Investor
2022
Your videos and images. Our AI platform. Find the perfect moment, identify and understand existing content, and accelerate content workflows with the Coactive Multimodal AI Platform. Our Multimodal Application Platform (MAP) unlocks the hidden value in your visual content, making it easy to discover valuable assets, analyze trends, and build a foundation for future AI-powered use cases.
Board Observer
2021
Talka extracts business-critical insights from video and voice conversations. Human conversations are the bedrock of solid business and personal relationships. We are a team of previous researchers at Google AI, Facebook AI, Deepmind, and other AI research institutions working on conversational understanding that got together to tackle the deep problem of understanding conversations and improving human communications where it adds a significant business value.
Board Observer
2021
Built IoT your way without the stress. Securely connect your MCU then capture and route sensor data anywhere with the Golioth SDK. Build secure, scalable, and innovative IoT in a fraction of the time.
Investor
2021
At Augmental Tech, we create technology that integrates with the human body to enable access to information and assistance when the use of hands is not possible, as well as continuous health monitoring at an unprecedented level.
Board Observer
2020
EnsoData uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to unlock more rapid, accurate, and affordable diagnoses of the biggest threats to human health. Over the past eight years, EnsoData has pioneered the clinical use and adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology in sleep medicine (and healthcare more broadly) to solve large-scale problems at the heart of diagnosis and treatment decision-making. EnsoData’s primary solution, EnsoSleep, was cleared by the FDA in 2017 to provide diagnostic analysis of in-lab sleep studies. EnsoSleep received expanded FDA clearance in 2021 to score and analyze home sleep studies, to add a viewing, editing, and reporting platform, and to record and output a total sleep time measurement. The latest EnsoData AI algorithm, EnsoSleep PPG, was cleared by the FDA in February of 2024. EnsoSleep PPG turns the widely available and wearable FDA-cleared pulse oximetry technology into a diagnostic tool for clinicians. This new clearance offers opportunities for clinicians to effectively reach patients by enabling AI-driven analysis using more accessible and cost-effective pulse oximeters. Ultimately, our suite of AI tools help clinicians reduce healthcare turnaround times, cut into patient backlogs, and ultimately, improve the patient care journey and health outcomes.
Experience · 18 entries
All (18)
Investments (15)
Board (3)
2026
Investor
2026
Inferact is a startup founded by creators and core maintainers of vLLM, the most popular open-source LLM inference engine. Our mission is to grow vLLM as the worlds AI inference engine and accelerate AI progress by making inference cheaper and faster.
2025
Investor
2025
Were building AI scientists and the autonomous laboratories for them to operate. Join us: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/periodic-labs
Investor
2025
Were an AI research company that builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems. Our first product is Claude, an AI assistant for tasks at any scale. Our research interests span multiple areas including natural language, human feedback, scaling laws, reinforcement learning, code generation, and interpretability.
Investor
2025
Created by researchers from UC Berkeley, Arena (formerly LMArena) is a community-powered platform to measure and advance the frontier of AI for real-world use. Tens of millions of builders, researchers, and creative professionals come to Arena to use frontier models and give feedback on their responses, shaping a public leaderboard grounded in real-world use.
Show all 18 entries ↓
Investment activity
2020–2026 · 15 investments
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