Manu Kumar

Co-founder & CEO @ HiHello 👋🏽• Co-founder @ Carta • Chief Firestarter @ K9 Ventures • Investor in Lyft, Twilio, Auth0, Carta, LucidChart, Everlaw, & more • 🦮-Human, Founder, Builder, Investor • The O.G. for Pre-Seed.

📍 Palo Alto, California, United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 44 investments📅 26 years investing🗓 Last invested Sep 2020𝕏 @upgrade_to_unlock
Operator-angel🌍 United States20+ investments
44
Total investments
31
Early stage
2
Mid stage
0
Late stage
26y
Years active

Portfolio

38 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor and Board Member
Sep 2020
From early screening to targeted intervention, we partner with schools, colleges, and businesses to provide culturally-inclusive, low-cost virtual support for a new generation of users.
Investor
Jul 2020
OtterTune automatically optimizes the configuration of Amazon-based PostgreSQL and MySQL databases to improve performance, reduce costs and maintain healthy operations.
Investor and Board Member
Apr 2020
The worlds first collaborate platform for schedules.
Investor and Board Member
Oct 2019
Discovery-Driven Compliance. Protect your data with automated privacy and security.
Investor & Board Member
Feb 2019
Daughters of Rosie helps growing build diverse teams. We only work with companies that are ready to walk the walk and protect their investment in diversity with practices and policies that ensure retention. Diversity, equity, and inclusion only get more challenging as teams scale. So we help companies invest in it now. Our typical customers are growing companies that have ambitious goals for racial and gender diversity and about 50-1000 employees.
early stageHuman Resources
Investor & Board Member
Jan 2019
Invisible AI – is an on-premise computer vision platform that captures data from manual assembly work and uses AI to make smart recommendations to improve plant productivity, quality, and safety.
Investor & Board Member
Nov 2017
Workona transforms your browser into a powerful work organizer for every project. Spaces keep important work for each project — cloud docs, tabs, notes & tasks — close at hand and easy to find. With over three million spaces created, Workona is transforming how modern work is done. Based in California, Workona’s team are experts at crafting elegant experiences in the cloud, with years of expertise in building collaborative productivity apps. To learn more (including job listings), please visit https://workona.com/
Investor & Board Member
Nov 2017
Forethought is the most advanced agentic AI system for customer support, trained on your unique data and ready on day one. Powered by Autoflows technology, it autonomously handles complex issues end-to-end by reasoning, planning, following up, integrating APIs, and troubleshooting. With a multi-agent architecture, Forethought’s AI supports your team across channels, solving customer issues, assisting human agents, and uncovering valuable insights. Transform your support operations with AI that learns and adapts to deliver more accurate, context-rich responses at scale.
Investor & Board Member
Oct 2017
Avoma is an AI Meeting Assistant and Revenue Intelligence solution for customer-facing teams for startups and scaleups. With Avoma, you can automatically record all your meetings, get full transcripts and summarized notes, and actionable insights synced directly to your CRM. AI-powered technology helps customer-facing teams capture important customer information, before, during, and after important meetings and shorten sales cycles and delight more customers. You can review calls and meetings faster by searching directly within transcripts and using identified topics to find exactly what you're looking for. Founded by Aditya Kothadiya, Devendra Laulkar, and Albert Lai, Avoma is the only solution built equally for both customer-facing reps and leaders.
Investor
Mar 2017
Aurora (Nasdaq: AUR) is delivering the benefits of self-driving technology safely, quickly, and broadly to make transportation safer, increasingly accessible, and more reliable and efficient than ever before. The Aurora Driver is a self-driving system designed to operate multiple vehicle types, from freight-hauling trucks to ride-hailing passenger vehicles, and underpins Aurora Horizon and Aurora Connect, its driver-as-a-service products for trucking and ride-hailing. Aurora is working with industry leaders across the transportation ecosystem, including Toyota, FedEx, Volvo Trucks, PACCAR, Uber, Uber Freight, U.S. Xpress, Werner, Covenant, Schneider, and Ryder. For Aurora’s latest news, visit aurora.tech and @aurora_inno on Twitter.
Investor & Board Member
Mar 2017
Compound Eye enables machines to understand their surroundings in 3D and in real time, using only passive sensors like cameras. Our technology gathers far more information about the environment than active sensors like lidar, for a fraction of the cost. Our mission is to bring superhuman senses to existing vehicles and to enable mass production of fully autonomous cars and other robots.
Investor & Board Member
Nov 2016
Streamlining and SPEEDING UP engineering workflows. Every development organization is plagued by dated build environments that waste both time and money. Engineers spend 15-30% of their productive time fighting with their infrastructure, ensuring proper tool setup, and waiting hours for jobs to complete. Meanwhile, companies are forced to massively overspend on static infrastructure, which must be sized for peak workloads. Crave solves these problems with no changes to existing tools or processes. Ask us how Crave can: - Speed up code compilation, tests and CI - Simplify management of shared dev-test infrastructure - Ease migration to Public or Private Cloud - Reduce Cloud opex costs Industries we cater to: - Semiconductors - Defense & Space - Computer & Network security - Consumer Electronics - Automobile We provide Infrastructure for Software and Chip design engineers: Accelerated, reproducible, stable software compilations as well as Infrastructure that is scalable vertically and horizontally Learn more at https://www.crave.io Contact us at contact@crave.io
Investor & Board Member
Oct 2016
Ripe berries rot in the fields with nobody to pick them. Desperate farmers scour the streets for more labor, and come away empty-handed. Groceries stores respond with ever-higher prices. Only farming robots can save us. At Traptic, we build strawberry picking robots. We are a venture-backed Bay Area startup that is saving US fruit and vegetable growers from a critical labor shortage. We deploy robotics, computer vision, and custom graspers in a novel machine that will harvest delicate crops quickly, cost effectively and at extremely high quality. Come join our team as we feed the world.
Investor & Board Member
Jun 2015
Nexkey is changing the way people experience access to anything that used a key in the past. The company has developed technology that can turn any mechanical lock, whether in a door, gate, padlock, locker or cabinet, into a cloud connected lock, managed through a mobile device. Nexkey’s platform not only saves time through simplified key management via digital keys but also streamlines processes and operations by providing added value from intelligent insights, where there were none before. Customers can now get real-time insights into building occupancy, space utilization, flow of people, usage of lockers or cabinets as well as notifications about unlock events, key shares or changes to important lock settings. Nexkey is uniquely positioned to make mechanical locks a thing of the past and create a future in which locks provide value that goes far beyond unlocking. And we're hiring! Join us in building the future of smarter access control.
Investor and Board Member
Oct 2014
Our mission is to make education as effective and efficient as possible. Instructors can grade both written and programming assignments on the same platform, in half the time or less. For some question types, Gradescope AI can group student answers together by content, so that instructors can save even more time while giving detailed feedback. Over 10M pages and over 100K programming projects have been graded at over 200 schools.
Show all 38 investments ↓
Experience · 47 entries
All (47)
Investments (43)
Founder (4)
Board (31)
2020
Investor and Board Member
Sep 2020
From early screening to targeted intervention, we partner with schools, colleges, and businesses to provide culturally-inclusive, low-cost virtual support for a new generation of users.
Investor
Jul 2020
OtterTune automatically optimizes the configuration of Amazon-based PostgreSQL and MySQL databases to improve performance, reduce costs and maintain healthy operations.
Investor and Board Member
Apr 2020
The worlds first collaborate platform for schedules.
2019
Investor and Board Member
Oct 2019
Discovery-Driven Compliance. Protect your data with automated privacy and security.
Investor & Board Member
Feb 2019
Daughters of Rosie helps growing build diverse teams. We only work with companies that are ready to walk the walk and protect their investment in diversity with practices and policies that ensure retention. Diversity, equity, and inclusion only get more challenging as teams scale. So we help companies invest in it now. Our typical customers are growing companies that have ambitious goals for racial and gender diversity and about 50-1000 employees.
early stageHuman Resources
Show all 47 entries ↓
Investment activity
2000–2020 · 44 investments
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