James Ephrati

Growth Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners

📍 United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 9 investments📅 4 years investing🗓 Last invested Jun 2026
VC🌍 United StatesInvested this quarter
9
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0
Early stage
1
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2
Late stage
4y
Years active

Portfolio

9 investments · sorted by recency
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Mid stage
Late stage
Board Member
Jun 2026
Frontier AI. In your hands. We believe in a future where AI is abundant and accessible. We aspire to empower the world to build with—and benefit from—the most significant technology of our time. Join us: https://jobs.lever.co/mistral/
Investor
Jun 2025
Cyera is the industry-leading AI Security Platform. As AI transforms how data is created, accessed, and used, Cyeras mission is to enable global enterprises to adopt AI at scale by securing the data that fuels it. The platform provides organizations with precise visibility, and intelligent controls to secure data everywhere - at rest, in motion, and in use, whether used by humans or agents. Valued at $9 billion and backed by more than $1.7 billion in funding from top-tier investors including Accel, Blackstone, Cyberstarts, Georgian, Lightspeed, and Sequoia, Cyera is trusted by a growing number of Fortune 1000 companies adopting AI across their enterprise at scale.
Board Observer
Sep 2024
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale, enabling organizations to see, understand, and act on all their disparate data so they can move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 25 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,400+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Follow Grafana Labs on LinkedIn and Twitter or visit grafana.com.
Board Member
Jan 2023
Aqua Security is the pioneer in securing containerized cloud native applications from development to production. Aquas full lifecycle solution prevents attacks by enforcing pre-deployment hygiene and mitigates attacks in real time in production, reducing mean time to repair and overall business risk. The Aqua Platform, a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), integrates security from Code to Cloud, combining the power of agent and agentless technology into a single solution. With enterprise scale that doesn’t slow development pipelines, Aqua secures your future in the cloud. Founded in 2015, Aqua is headquartered in Boston, MA and Ramat Gan, IL protecting over 500 of the world’s largest enterprises.
Board Member
Jan 2023
Yellow.ai powers the future of service with Agentic AI. We help enterprises move beyond traditional chatbots to deploy autonomous AI agents that understand, decide, and act...across voice, chat, and multimodal channels. Trained on 16B+ conversations annually and built on a multi-LLM architecture, our platform enables real-time orchestration of workflows, decisions, and enterprise actions. The result? Faster resolutions, scalable efficiency, and radically improved customer and employee experiences. 1300+ global brands across 85+ countries trust Yellow.ai to transform service at scale. Key logos include Sony, Hyundai, Dominos, ITC Ltd, Ferrellgas, Waste Connections, Lulu Group, and Randstad, Headquartered in San Mateo with offices across 6 countries, Yellow.ai is backed by $102M+ in funding from leading investors.
Board Member
Jan 2023
ThoughtSpot is the Agentic Analytics Platform for every enterprise. Our mission is to create a more fact-driven world by empowering everyone to explore any data, ask any question, and uncover actionable insights faster—leading to growth, better business outcomes, and efficiency in their organizations: www.thoughtspot.com With ThoughtSpot’s intuitive natural language search, every user can confidently generate answers from their business data at every point of decisioning. The platform’s unified capabilities, along with our agentic AI analyst, Spotter, enable users to create precise, transparent, personalized, and actionable insights with enterprise grade trust, security, and scale. Accessible via the web and mobile app, ThoughtSpot ensures intelligent decision-making happens seamlessly, wherever and whenever needed. For developers, ThoughtSpot Embedded offers a low-code solution to integrate AI-powered analytics directly into products and services, driving data monetization and boosting user engagement for customers. Industry leaders like Vizio, Hilton Worldwide, Capital One and Huel rely on ThoughtSpot to transform how their employees and customers take advantage of data to create better business outcomes. Try ThoughtSpot today and experience the new era of analytics: https://www.thoughtspot.com/trial
Board Member
Jan 2023
Exabeam is a leader in intelligence and automation that powers security operations for the world’s smartest companies. As a global cybersecurity innovator, Exabeam provides industry-proven, security-focused, and flexible solutions for faster, more accurate threat detection, investigation, and response (TDIR). Cutting-edge technology enhances security operations center performance, optimizing workflows and accelerating time to resolution. With consistent leadership in AI innovation and a proven track record in security information and event management (SIEM) and user behavior analytics, Exabeam empowers global security teams to combat cyberthreats, mitigate risk, and streamline operations. Learn more at www.exabeam.com.
Board Observer
Jan 2023
Yugabyte is the company behind open source YugabyteDB, the AI-ready, high-performance, PostgreSQL-compatible, distributed database for mission-critical cloud native applications. Built using a unique combination of high-performance document store, auto sharding, per-shard distributed consensus replication and multi-shard ACID transactions (inspired by Google Spanner), YugabyteDB serves both scale-out RDBMS and internet-scale OLTP workloads with low query latency, extreme resilience against failures and global data distribution. As a cloud native database, it can be deployed across public and private clouds as well as in Kubernetes environments with ease. We are backed by top-tier investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, Alkeon Capital, Meritech Capital, 8VC, Wipro Ventures, and Wells Fargo Strategic Capital. We are hiring across the board in Engineering, Sales and Marketing. Apply on our Careers page: https://www.yugabyte.com/about/careers/ GitHub (Apache 2.0): https://github.com/yugabyte/yugabyte-db Docs: https://docs.yugabyte.com To discover more, join the Yugabyte Community via our Slack channel and connect with database experts from across the world: https://inviter.co/yugabytedb
Board Observer
Oct 2022
Work AI for all. The Work AI platform connected to all your data. Find, create, and automate anything.
Experience · 11 entries
All (11)
Investments (9)
Board (8)
2026
Board Member
Jun 2026
Frontier AI. In your hands. We believe in a future where AI is abundant and accessible. We aspire to empower the world to build with—and benefit from—the most significant technology of our time. Join us: https://jobs.lever.co/mistral/
2025
Investor
Jun 2025
Cyera is the industry-leading AI Security Platform. As AI transforms how data is created, accessed, and used, Cyeras mission is to enable global enterprises to adopt AI at scale by securing the data that fuels it. The platform provides organizations with precise visibility, and intelligent controls to secure data everywhere - at rest, in motion, and in use, whether used by humans or agents. Valued at $9 billion and backed by more than $1.7 billion in funding from top-tier investors including Accel, Blackstone, Cyberstarts, Georgian, Lightspeed, and Sequoia, Cyera is trusted by a growing number of Fortune 1000 companies adopting AI across their enterprise at scale.
2024
Board Observer
Sep 2024
Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud, is founded on the principles of open source, open standards, open ecosystems, and open culture. Grafana Cloud, our fully managed observability platform, is flexible and built for scale, enabling organizations to see, understand, and act on all their disparate data so they can move at the speed of their ambitions. Today, more than 25 million users and 7,000+ customers – including Anthropic, Bloomberg, NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Salesforce – trust Grafana Labs to ensure reliability of their applications and systems, resolve incidents quickly, and optimize their telemetry to reduce noise and cost. We are a 100% remote company with 1,400+ team members across 40+ countries, and we’re backed by leading investors including Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital, GIC, Coatue, J.P. Morgan, CapitalG, and Lead Edge Capital. Follow Grafana Labs on LinkedIn and Twitter or visit grafana.com.
2023
Board Member
Jan 2023
Aqua Security is the pioneer in securing containerized cloud native applications from development to production. Aquas full lifecycle solution prevents attacks by enforcing pre-deployment hygiene and mitigates attacks in real time in production, reducing mean time to repair and overall business risk. The Aqua Platform, a Cloud Native Application Protection Platform (CNAPP), integrates security from Code to Cloud, combining the power of agent and agentless technology into a single solution. With enterprise scale that doesn’t slow development pipelines, Aqua secures your future in the cloud. Founded in 2015, Aqua is headquartered in Boston, MA and Ramat Gan, IL protecting over 500 of the world’s largest enterprises.
Board Member
Jan 2023
Yellow.ai powers the future of service with Agentic AI. We help enterprises move beyond traditional chatbots to deploy autonomous AI agents that understand, decide, and act...across voice, chat, and multimodal channels. Trained on 16B+ conversations annually and built on a multi-LLM architecture, our platform enables real-time orchestration of workflows, decisions, and enterprise actions. The result? Faster resolutions, scalable efficiency, and radically improved customer and employee experiences. 1300+ global brands across 85+ countries trust Yellow.ai to transform service at scale. Key logos include Sony, Hyundai, Dominos, ITC Ltd, Ferrellgas, Waste Connections, Lulu Group, and Randstad, Headquartered in San Mateo with offices across 6 countries, Yellow.ai is backed by $102M+ in funding from leading investors.
Show all 11 entries ↓
Investment activity
2022–2026 · 9 investments
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