Casey Aylward is a former software engineer who joined Pinterest through the acquisition of URX, an Accel-backed startup, giving her the rare experience of having been an early engineer inside a company her current firm previously funded before returning as a partner. She specializes in cloud-native infrastructure, open-source software, and security investments, and is known for incubating companies at the earliest stages and writing publicly about technical infrastructure topics as a content-forward voice in these ecosystems.

• Deep interest in AI infrastructure and machine learning optimization, evidenced by her heavy involvement in organizing the CUDA Mode IRL hackathon and highlighting technical talks on topics like Flash Attention 3 and GPU performance tuning.
• Enthusiasm for next-generation developer tools and open-source ecosystems, particularly those that unify fragmented toolchains in JavaScript and Python, such as her detailed support for Evan You's VoidZero and Charlie Marsh's Astral.
• Appreciation for highly technical founders tackling ambitious problems in science and engineering, such as her excitement about the Periodic Labs team moving from building ChatGPT to applying AI to scientific discovery.
• Active role in fostering technical communities through in-person events, demonstrated by her work hosting happy hours at conferences like NeurIPS and bringing digital communities like the GPU Mode Discord server into the real world for collaborative hacking.
• Support for portfolio companies through recruiting and talent acquisition, frequently posting unique roles for fast-growing startups like Astral to help them attract top-tier engineering talent.