Jonathan Tower

VC | Managing $5Bn AUM | Seeded 10+ Unicorns | $30Bn+ in exits | 85+ PoCos | Building an AI-native venture platform | Writes about how AI is reorganizing the global economy

📍 San Francisco, California, United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 38 investments📅 11 years investing🗓 Last invested Nov 2024𝕏 @upgrade_to_unlock
VC🌍 United States20+ investments
38
Total investments
8
Early stage
13
Mid stage
2
Late stage
11y
Years active

Portfolio

35 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor
Nov 2024
Semiconductor interconnects
Investor
Nov 2024
Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine platform technology with research-driven data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes. Snorkel led the development of Senior SWE-Bench and launched Open Benchmarks Grants with a $3 million commitment to support open-source datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation research. Supported projects include Agents’ Last Exam, OSWorld 2.0, Terminal-Bench, Continual Learning Bench, and SlopCode Bench. Learn more at snorkel.ai or follow @SnorkelAI.
Investor (Acquired by Meta)
Oct 2024
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
Aug 2024
Discover the limitless potential of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for groundbreaking research at Greenstone, a leading Bay Area biotech company. We combine cutting-edge technology with AI, computational biology, and pharmacogenomics to accelerate drug discovery and development, transforming the future of therapeutics. Our vision is to transform drug discovery from a slow, sequential, and high-failure process into a rapid, integrated, and novel computational platform. By harnessing the power of iPSCs and our advanced technologies, we revolutionize the traditional drug discovery paradigm, paving the way for a faster, more efficient approach. With our curated and diverse collection of iPSCs, sourced from both healthy individuals and those affected by various diseases, we offer a comprehensive platform for disease modeling, uncovering novel mechanisms, and advancing drug discovery. Our high-quality iPSCs provide researchers with patient-specific and disease-specific cells, enabling the development of personalized treatment strategies. At Greenstone, collaboration and innovation are at the core of our values. We proudly offer our iPSCs to academic investigators free of cost, fostering an environment of shared knowledge and progress. Together, we can unlock new insights, accelerate drug discovery, and shape the future of personalized medicine. Join us on the frontier of biomedical research and tap into the immense potential of iPSCs. Together, lets transform drug discovery into a rapid, integrated, and computational platform that propels us towards groundbreaking therapeutics. #Biotech #iPSCs #DrugDiscovery #BiomedicalResearch #PersonalizedMedicine #Innovation
Investor
Jul 2024
Cohere is the leading security-first enterprise AI company. We build cutting-edge foundation models and end-to-end AI products designed to solve real-world business problems. We partner closely with companies to deliver seamless integration, full customization, and easy-to-use solutions for their workforce and customers. Our all-in-one platform offers enterprises the highest levels of data security, privacy and optionality to deploy across all major cloud providers, private cloud environments, or on-premises. HQ: 171 John Street, 2nd Floor, Toronto, ON M5T 1X3
Investor
Jul 2024
Lineajes full-lifecycle software supply chain security is designed to meet the specific compliance, governance and automation needs of companies that source, build, deploy, sell or buy critical software. Its technology allows organizations to autonomously and effectively source safe software, contextualize risks, auto-secure builds, and manage risk and compliance. Customers use Lineaje to know what is in their software, eliminate vulnerability exposure, deploy self-healing containers, auto-fix all vulnerabilities and comply with global regulations. The company is trusted by top technology, financial and public sector organizations that must secure and manage critical code, complex software supply chains and large software portfolios.
Investor
Jun 2024
Frore Systems is a pioneer in advanced thermal technologies that unleash performance across data centers and edge devices. The company’s flagship solutions include LiquidJetTM, a multi-stage 3D short-loop jetchannel multi-stage liquid cooling coldplate for data centers delivering higher GPU performance, improved PUE and reduced TCO; LiquidJetTM Nexus, a light weight integrated coldplate system that integrates multiple LiquidJets and eliminates all hoses, connectors and manifolds enabling ½U compute trays and AirJet®, the world’s first solid-state active air-cooling chip used in consumer, industrial, and IoT markets delivering higher performance in ultra-compact, silent, light, dustproof and water-resistant edge devices. Frore Systems’ patented cooling technologies are integrated into products from major OEMs and system builders worldwide. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, with manufacturing operations in Taiwan, Frore Systems is redefining thermal architecture for the AI era.
Investor (Acquired by Nvidia for $20Bn)
May 2024
Inference is the engine that powers AI, and Groq was built from the silicon up to deliver the worlds fastest inference at scale. We pioneered the LPU—the first processor designed specifically for AI inference—and are transforming that innovation into a global cloud platform powering production AI workloads. With the capital, infrastructure, and team to execute, were uniquely positioned to define the next era of AI infrastructure. The opportunity is massive, and its still wide open. Now lets go build it!
Investor
Jan 2024
Celona is an early pioneer and innovator within the multi-billion-dollar private wireless market. The company is credited with developing the industry’s first fully turnkey enterprise 5G LAN system that leverages emerging shared cellular spectrum to enable companies, for the first time. To own and operate their private mobile network infrastructure. Its products and technology help organizations accelerate the adoption of business-critical applications and use cases to support a new generation of Industry 4.0 digital business initiatives. Founded in 2019 by industry leaders with technical expertise in cellular, enterprise wireless and cloud computing, the company is privately held. To date, Celona has raised $100 million from premiere investors including Qualcomm Ventures, NTT Venture Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Cervin Ventures and DigitalBridge. Celona’s private wireless system solves long-standing wireless issues such as reliability, coverage, deterministic connectivity, quality of service, and security, not satisfied by conventional wireless technologies. Celona’s private wireless system is also the first-of-its kind to tightly integrate network and radio functions – full stack core software and cloud-based orchestration – into a unified solution ready for direct integration within any existing enterprise network infrastructure by enterprise IT staff. It combines all the components required to enable an IT team to build their own 4G/5G wireless networks in a single package that is easy to deploy, integrate and manage at scale. Celona sells its products and technology directly and indirectly to companies around the world through a diverse network of top channel partners, managed service providers and system integrators. And our products serve as the foundation for Verizon’s Onsite private 5G service as well as NTT’s P5G offering.
Investor
Nov 2023
Together AI is the AI Native Cloud, purpose-built for AI engineers and researchers with a full suite of tooling across inference, model shaping, and pre-training. AI natives can use Together AI as a full-stack AI platform — from a high- performance inference engine built for reliable and fast scaling to on-demand GPU clusters and massive-scale AI factories. Together AI continuously pushes the frontier forward by productizing cutting-edge research from our world-leading AI systems research team. By combining research velocity with production-grade infrastructure, we enable companies to reliably scale AI-native applications as fast as the field evolves. Trusted by leading AI natives like Cursor, Decagon, Eleven Labs, AI21, Hedra, and Cartesia, as well as SaaS innovators such as Salesforce, Zoom, and Zomato, Together AI powers the next generation of AI-native applications.
Investor
Oct 2023
Acceldata provides an Agentic Data Management platform that simplifies and speeds the ability for enterprises to deliver trusted data for AI and other initiatives. Founded in 2018, Campbell, CA-based Acceldata developed the worlds first enterprise data observability platform to help enterprises build and operate great data products. Built on that foundation, Acceldatas xLake Reasoning Engine now powers the Agentic Data Management platform. Acceldatas solutions have been embraced by global enterprises such as Nestle, Dun & Bradstreet, Hershey, Pubmatic, HCSC, PhonePe (Walmart), TPG Telecom (Australia), Jenius Bank, Merkle, Pubmatic, and many more. Acceldata investors include Insight Partners, March Capital, Industry Ventures, Lightspeed, Sorenson Ventures, Sanabil, and Emergent Ventures.
Investor
Oct 2023
Our AI can prognosticate patient outcomes & personalize treatment in localized prostate cancer. Five Phase III randomized trials were used to develop prognostic and predictive AI biomarkers.
Investor
Oct 2023
Cowbell is the commercial insurance partner that makes brokers more successful by delivering coverage clients can actually understand and protection that strengthens their business. Cowbells mission is to make digital risks manageable, helping businesses understand, prevent, and recover with confidence. We believe that protection should create confidence, not complexity. We don’t add to the noise. We help you make sense of it. That is Cowbell—the Sound Approach to Risk.
mid stageInsurance
Investor
Aug 2023
Nile is a pioneer and leader in Secure Networking-as-a-Service (NaaS). It is leading a fundamental shift in the industry with a clean-slate approach that brings the power of zero-trust, autonomous operations and cloud to deliver compelling business outcomes and act as a force multiplier for IT. Nile solutions cut through complexity and cost versus legacy solutions, while delivering radical operational simplicity, security and speed with stellar user experiences.
Investor
Jul 2023
Hammerspace is radically changing how unstructured data is used and preserved. Our Global Data Platform unifies unstructured data across edge, data centers, and clouds. It provides extreme parallel performance for AI, GPUs, and high-speed data analytics, and orchestrates data to any location and any storage system. This approach creates a Global Data Platform that eliminates data silos and makes data an instantly accessible resource for users, applications, and compute clusters, no matter where they are located.
Show all 35 investments ↓
Experience · 44 entries
All (44)
Investments (38)
Board (1)
2024
Investor
Nov 2024
Semiconductor interconnects
Investor
Nov 2024
Uniphore is the Business AI Company powering the agentic enterprise. The Business AI Cloud is the only sovereign, composable and secure AI platform that enables businesses to rapidly adopt, significantly transform and immediately unlock the value of their data.  Trusted by more than 2,500 of the world’s largest enterprises and recognized by Gartner, Forrester, IDC and the Deloitte Fast 500, Uniphore is where enterprise AI moves from ambitions to production. Learn more by following us on LinkedIn and visiting our website.
Investor
Nov 2024
Snorkel AI is the frontier AI data lab, helping teams build the data and environments behind high-performing frontier and agentic AI. We combine platform technology with research-driven data development to create datasets, benchmarks, evals, and custom solutions for real-world AI systems. Founded out of the Stanford AI Lab in 2019, Snorkel works with leading AI labs and enterprises to move from better data to better outcomes. Snorkel led the development of Senior SWE-Bench and launched Open Benchmarks Grants with a $3 million commitment to support open-source datasets, benchmarks, and evaluation research. Supported projects include Agents’ Last Exam, OSWorld 2.0, Terminal-Bench, Continual Learning Bench, and SlopCode Bench. Learn more at snorkel.ai or follow @SnorkelAI.
Investor (Acquired by Meta)
Oct 2024
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
Aug 2024
Discover the limitless potential of human induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) for groundbreaking research at Greenstone, a leading Bay Area biotech company. We combine cutting-edge technology with AI, computational biology, and pharmacogenomics to accelerate drug discovery and development, transforming the future of therapeutics. Our vision is to transform drug discovery from a slow, sequential, and high-failure process into a rapid, integrated, and novel computational platform. By harnessing the power of iPSCs and our advanced technologies, we revolutionize the traditional drug discovery paradigm, paving the way for a faster, more efficient approach. With our curated and diverse collection of iPSCs, sourced from both healthy individuals and those affected by various diseases, we offer a comprehensive platform for disease modeling, uncovering novel mechanisms, and advancing drug discovery. Our high-quality iPSCs provide researchers with patient-specific and disease-specific cells, enabling the development of personalized treatment strategies. At Greenstone, collaboration and innovation are at the core of our values. We proudly offer our iPSCs to academic investigators free of cost, fostering an environment of shared knowledge and progress. Together, we can unlock new insights, accelerate drug discovery, and shape the future of personalized medicine. Join us on the frontier of biomedical research and tap into the immense potential of iPSCs. Together, lets transform drug discovery into a rapid, integrated, and computational platform that propels us towards groundbreaking therapeutics. #Biotech #iPSCs #DrugDiscovery #BiomedicalResearch #PersonalizedMedicine #Innovation
Show all 44 entries ↓
Investment activity
2015–2024 · 38 investments
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