Michael Dolbec

Venture Industrialist

📍 Menlo Park, California, United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 27 investments📅 13 years investing🗓 Last invested Jul 2026𝕏 @upgrade_to_unlock
VC🌍 United States20+ investmentsInvested this quarter
27
Total investments
7
Early stage
11
Mid stage
7
Late stage
13y
Years active

Portfolio

25 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Board Observer
Jul 2026
Frenos is the first AI-native OT penetration testing platform, purpose built for critical infrastructure, defense, and industrial control environments. We enable organizations to safely and continuously test the defensibility of their operational technology without touching production systems. Our platform combines digital twin modeling, AI adversary reasoning, and attack path simulation to uncover real-world exposures, validate controls, and prioritize mitigations all without disruption. By emulating the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of nation-state and ransomware actors, Frenos reveals exactly how adversaries could move through your OT environment and what defensive actions matter most. Built by OT security experts and offensive practitioners, Frenos empowers red teams, blue teams, and CISOs to shift from periodic assessments to continuous validation moving beyond visibility to measurable resilience. Whether deployed as a laptop-based assessment tool or an enterprise-grade continuous red teaming platform, Frenos delivers the automation, consistency, and insight needed to stay ahead of modern OT threats.
Board Member
May 2024
Luffy AI has developed ultra-efficient, adaptive neural networks that enable true learning and adaption at the edge. At over 800 times more computationally efficient, we can target applications completely inaccessible to current AI approaches. Luffy is leveraging this advantage to build AI control systems that learn the nuances of the equipment and adapt to changes over time to obtain maximum performance and robustness. Building on a platform technology, we are now targeting early adopters in industrial manufacturing and robotics. We have just deployed one of our adaptive AI controllers into a composites process with a UK Industry4.0 manufacturer. The AI allows better control of the temperature profile, reducing the calibration time of the process and increasing overall throughput and energy efficiency. Our products service major companies in the metals, chemicals, specialty materials and drone sectors.
Board Member
Apr 2024
Composabl is a platform for creating intelligent autonomous agents from composable building blocks.
Board Member
Oct 2023
Semiconductor manufacturers and fabs can no longer afford to innovate at the pace humans alone can sustain. AI solutions augment what they do best, so they can do it better. We began minds.ai by applying deep learning solutions to enterprise business problems in pharma, the automotive industry, and enterprise operations. From there, we created DeepSim, a flexible AI engine that combines a powerful mix of open-source and proprietary AI tools into a simple, stable, cloud-based platform. minds.ai Maestro uses DeepSim as a backbone, helping optimize processes for leaders in large-scale semiconductor manufacturing. Founded in 2014, headquarters in Silicon Valley. Offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore.
Board Member
Aug 2023
APERIO is the leader in industrial data quality solutions. We help customers drive profitability and sustainability goals while mitigating risk in their industrial operations. Powered by AI machine learning, APERIO automatically validates operational data at scale to improve data accuracy, security, and value, allowing for better, smarter business decisions based on real-time, trusted, superior data.
Board Observer
Aug 2023
Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) have never been human-centric. Poor data management, broken traceability, and not designed for the average factory worker. Not anymore - we’ve fixed it. Pico MES is a fresh approach to factory operating systems and enables a connected environment to limitless factory tools, capturing data for visibility into the supply chain. Pico MES has migrated dozens of mid-sized factories off of paper-based systems and helped improve product quality for American factories in battery manufacturing, automotive, and aerospace. Pico MES is designed by end users, for future end users. Our company has a 100% remote workforce and we empower our staff to work anywhere, help everywhere.
late stageManufacturing
Board Member
Nov 2022
Raven is a manufacturing technology leader that helps companies empower the frontline and improve operational performance with our automated contextualization and OEE software. Raven combines and analyzes data from machines and input from operators to provide a real-time, meaningful timeline of events with context for everything that’s happening on the line — accounting for 100% of production time and OEE losses. By replacing manual pen-and-paper tasks with smart devices, operators can tag the exact reason for downtime and inefficiencies with the touch of a button. With round-the-clock data collection, Raven’s visual UI displays real-time alerts to drive what actions and improvements to take next, driving continuous improvements across plants. Powered by AI-based cloud analytics and IoT/edge devices. To learn how leading manufacturers like Walmart, Danaher, Michelin and Coca-Cola are accelerating continuous improvement and enhancing the day-to-day work of frontline teams with Raven, visit raven.ai.
Board Member
Aug 2022
Shoreline is an industrial AI/ML asset performance management SaaS solution company. It enables asset-intensive industries to connect all their assets to manage performance, improve efficiency, reduce maintenance costs, extend equipment useful life by decades and unlock rich operational data. It was founded by AI, ML, Cloud, HW and industrial machine modeling experts from leading companies. For more information visit https://www.shorelineai.us
Board Member
Jan 2022
AKUA is a subscription data service delivering actionable, real-time, and secure business intelligence directly to cargo owners. Their flexible IoT platform provides persistent environmental monitoring and tracking solutions for intermodal cargo containers with no new equipment to buy or manage. AKUA IoT gateway devices, sensors, and device logistics are included in the subscription, and any existing IoT sensors can also be integrated into the system. AKUA combines the industry’s most advanced tracking devices, tamper-resistant and tamper-evident multi-layer security, and in-transit analytics into a seamless cloud-based solution.
Board Observer
Sep 2018
Xage is the first and only zero trust real-world security company. The Xage Fabric accelerates and simplifies the way enterprises and governments secure, manage and transform digital operations across OT, IT, and cloud. Xage solutions include Identity & Access Management for on-site security, zero trust remote access, and data protection, all powered by the Xage Fabric.
Board Observer
Sep 2018
Equalum is trusted by the worlds leading companies to stream data to the cloud in real-time, powering data warehouse modernization, real-time analytics, AI/ML, and more. Backed by industry-leading change data capture (CDC), our platform helps you deliver critical business data across your organization with more speed, reliability and accuracy than ever before. • Optimized for leading cloud data warehouses • Enterprise-grade monitoring, alerting, and data ops • Exactly once guarantee & end-to-end workflow management • Leverage Kafka and Spark under the hood, built in and fully configured. No coding required.
Board Observer
Sep 2018
Portworx is the cloud native storage company that enterprises depend on to reduce the cost and complexity of rapidly deploying containerized applications across multiple clouds and on-prem environments. With Portworx, you can manage any database or stateful service on any infrastructure using any container scheduler. You get a single data management layer for all of your stateful services, no matter where they run. Portworx thrives in multi-cloud environments.
Board Observer
Sep 2018
IoTium provides a secure managed software-defined network infrastructure for industrial IoT to securely connect legacy and greenfield mission-critical on-site machinery and automation & control systems to applications that reside in datacenters or the cloud - all at scale. The solution is zero-touch provisioned eliminating all complexities in scalable mass deployment.
Board Observer
Nov 2017
Element powers digitally-enabled operations for the Industrial Enterprise. Tackling one of the most critical gaps in Industrial IoT –– the fact that 95% of data across the Industrial Enterprise is unusable because it’s fragmented and disconnected –– Element Unify breaks through the data silos by bringing IT and OT data and teams together for the first time on a single solution. With Element Unify, IT and OT teams can collaboratively make data-driven operational and business decisions around rich, contextualized metadata, while ensuring scale, reliability and security. Industrial Enterprises can see up to a 300% increase in time to insight, reduced organizational fragmentation, and a 100% increase in data usability with Element. Element's customers represent over $500 billion in revenue, $300 billion in fixed assets, and 350,000 employees. Element is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
Board Observer
Nov 2017
Element powers digitally-enabled operations for the Industrial Enterprise. Tackling one of the most critical gaps in Industrial IoT –– the fact that 95% of data across the Industrial Enterprise is unusable because it’s fragmented and disconnected –– Element Unify breaks through the data silos by bringing IT and OT data and teams together for the first time on a single solution. With Element Unify, IT and OT teams can collaboratively make data-driven operational and business decisions around rich, contextualized metadata, while ensuring scale, reliability and security. Industrial Enterprises can see up to a 300% increase in time to insight, reduced organizational fragmentation, and a 100% increase in data usability with Element. Element's customers represent over $500 billion in revenue, $300 billion in fixed assets, and 350,000 employees. Element is headquartered in San Francisco, CA.
Show all 25 investments ↓
Experience · 38 entries
All (38)
Investments (27)
Founder (1)
Board (24)
2026
Board Observer
Jul 2026
Frenos is the first AI-native OT penetration testing platform, purpose built for critical infrastructure, defense, and industrial control environments. We enable organizations to safely and continuously test the defensibility of their operational technology without touching production systems. Our platform combines digital twin modeling, AI adversary reasoning, and attack path simulation to uncover real-world exposures, validate controls, and prioritize mitigations all without disruption. By emulating the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) of nation-state and ransomware actors, Frenos reveals exactly how adversaries could move through your OT environment and what defensive actions matter most. Built by OT security experts and offensive practitioners, Frenos empowers red teams, blue teams, and CISOs to shift from periodic assessments to continuous validation moving beyond visibility to measurable resilience. Whether deployed as a laptop-based assessment tool or an enterprise-grade continuous red teaming platform, Frenos delivers the automation, consistency, and insight needed to stay ahead of modern OT threats.
2024
Board Member
May 2024
Luffy AI has developed ultra-efficient, adaptive neural networks that enable true learning and adaption at the edge. At over 800 times more computationally efficient, we can target applications completely inaccessible to current AI approaches. Luffy is leveraging this advantage to build AI control systems that learn the nuances of the equipment and adapt to changes over time to obtain maximum performance and robustness. Building on a platform technology, we are now targeting early adopters in industrial manufacturing and robotics. We have just deployed one of our adaptive AI controllers into a composites process with a UK Industry4.0 manufacturer. The AI allows better control of the temperature profile, reducing the calibration time of the process and increasing overall throughput and energy efficiency. Our products service major companies in the metals, chemicals, specialty materials and drone sectors.
Board Member
Apr 2024
Composabl is a platform for creating intelligent autonomous agents from composable building blocks.
2023
Board Member
Oct 2023
Semiconductor manufacturers and fabs can no longer afford to innovate at the pace humans alone can sustain. AI solutions augment what they do best, so they can do it better. We began minds.ai by applying deep learning solutions to enterprise business problems in pharma, the automotive industry, and enterprise operations. From there, we created DeepSim, a flexible AI engine that combines a powerful mix of open-source and proprietary AI tools into a simple, stable, cloud-based platform. minds.ai Maestro uses DeepSim as a backbone, helping optimize processes for leaders in large-scale semiconductor manufacturing. Founded in 2014, headquarters in Silicon Valley. Offices in Amsterdam and Bangalore.
Board Member
Aug 2023
APERIO is the leader in industrial data quality solutions. We help customers drive profitability and sustainability goals while mitigating risk in their industrial operations. Powered by AI machine learning, APERIO automatically validates operational data at scale to improve data accuracy, security, and value, allowing for better, smarter business decisions based on real-time, trusted, superior data.
Show all 38 entries ↓
Investment activity
2013–2026 · 27 investments
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