First Spark Ventures grew out of SRI International, where founding partner Manish Kothari incubated more than 25 deep-tech startups, and the firm follows the idea that there's no IP transfer without IQ transfer, meaning they prefer the original inventors to stay involved in building the company. They invest across software, hardware, and biotech (what they call "wetware"), with a team that includes people from national-security and frontier-tech backgrounds, plus Eric Schmidt serving as strategic advisor and founding non-managing partner.