Natalie Vais brings an unusually deep technical background to venture investing, having spent her early career building databases and distributed systems as Director of Product at an analytics startup acquired by Twitter and later as Product Lead on Google Cloud Firestore, giving her firsthand experience with the infrastructure tools she now evaluates. She approaches investing with an engineering mindset, often breaking down complex infrastructure problems into structured system maps and focusing on what she calls "systems you can love"—technical products that hide complexity behind great user experiences for developers.

• Deeply interested in foundational data infrastructure and transactional databases. Believes the tech landscape is becoming highly transactional due to digital payments, volume of API calls, and autonomous AI agents. For example, led a funding round for TigerBeetleDB to support their modern financial transactions database and frequently highlights heavy acquisition activity in the transactional processing sector.
• Focused on open source software and developer tools built by teams that prioritize earning developer trust and shipping quickly. Demonstrated this by investing in Mastra, noting their ability to build a default framework for agents that developers inherently trust and want to adopt.
• Passionate about systems optimization and hardware efficiency, specifically the need to make software run faster while consuming fewer resources. Highlighted KubeCon discussions regarding the optimization of software to use less CPU, which results in more performant and cost effective systems for heavy AI workloads.
• Drawn to highly functional infrastructure that simplifies the developer experience, often favoring technologies that solve complex backend problems without extra setup. Praised a tool from ElectricSQL that allows developers to run databases directly inside a sandbox without needing complex connection strings, proving a strong preference for seamless integrations.
• Dedicated to the advancement of distributed systems, software quality, and testing. Frequently attends and praises highly technical systems conferences and actively highlighted the creation of a software quality alliance that brings together various infrastructure startups to improve reliability across the developer ecosystem.