Mahdi Raza co-founded Exponent after operating roles at Robinhood through its IPO and leading early growth at passwordless auth startup Stytch, then transitioning from fintech investment banking at Evercore and investing at GIC to become an operator. He focuses on backing ambitious founders building real products in software, payments, and AI that transform legacy industries like insurance, emphasizing a first-principles approach that views good valuations as separate from good investments.

• A strong focus on "Agentic" AI and vertical platforms that modernize legacy or regulated industries. He is particularly interested in software that bypasses tedious implementation processes in sectors like public safety and government, demonstrated by his support for Obvio and other teams improving public sector productivity.
• Deep interest in the intersection of traditional finance and crypto, specifically regarding infrastructure and security. He views the acquisition of Privy by Stripe and raises by companies like Turnkey as validation that these two worlds are merging, favoring non-custodial and programmable infrastructure.
• A specific thesis on empowering Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) through better security and automation. He has discussed the concept of "Results as a Service," where AI models handle voice and text tasks to complete actual jobs for SMBs, as well as the urgent need for managed service providers to offer better security platforms to protect small businesses from sophisticated threats.
• Searching for healthcare innovations that address administrative workflows or drastically lower costs to improve access. He explicitly mentioned looking for opportunities to reduce the cost of fertility services by ten times to make them accessible to a broader demographic, alongside improvements in payment workflows between payers, providers, and patients.
• Active support for founders at the very earliest "pre-company" stages, particularly those based in New York. He promotes initiatives like his firm's "Kessel Run," designed to help entrepreneurs navigate the messy period before they have written their first line of code or even selected a company name.
• Enthusiasm for the "physical world" applications of AI, particularly computer vision. He sees the commoditization of hardware as an opportunity to deploy computer vision at the edge, enabling new control planes for physical environments that can save lives and improve outcomes.