Sandhya Venkatachalam is a venture capital investor at Khosla Ventures who previously founded Deep Ventures, a seed firm focused on AI/ML companies, and has a track record of early investments in technical infrastructure businesses like Groq, which she backed at a $30M valuation before it reached multi-billion dollar status. She brings unusual operating experience from her time as Head of Corporate Development and VP of Product at Skype, where she built a data-driven advertising business from zero to $100M revenue that helped support the company's $8.5B sale to Microsoft.

• Prioritizes practical and highly usable artificial intelligence products over flashy demonstrations or novelties. There is a strong preference for technology that serves the global population instead of a select few, requiring systems that genuinely change how people live and work. For example, the firm backed Serif specifically because the product handles the heavy lifting of workflows, saving users from having to constantly monitor the output or figure out the perfect prompts.
• Values deep user empathy and a strict focus on solving tangible customer problems above raw technical capabilities alone. Small startups are seen as having a distinct advantage over large tech labs when they prioritize intuitive design and actual customer needs. A notable example is the investment in Forethought, where the founders were praised for spending years developing product intuition and real world context to completely reshape the customer service experience.
• Seeks out founders who are building today based on a clear vision of what the world will look like five years from now. Taking early, high conviction bets on pioneers who challenge the status quo is a major priority. This is shown through early seed and angel investments in companies like Groq, Fireflies, and Forethought, the latter of which was backed right after the foundational research papers on transformers were first published.
• Interested in autonomous systems and specialized automation that dramatically reduce the need for human intervention. The ideal future interface is viewed as one where humans do not have to manually interact with the web at all. A prime example is Gale, which operates as an automated, native artificial intelligence immigration firm rather than just another software tool for existing lawyers, successfully handling the vast majority of visa processes to eliminate standard industry delays and exorbitant fees.