Pre-traction, Research-driven, on the Evolutionary Edge of Computing.
Drawing on our experience as founders and our network of strategic partners across industries and regions, we help hard computing startups think big and grow fast.

The best partners for researcher founders to invent the future with.


Drew Volpe
Founding Partner
Drew Volpe is an accomplished investor, founder, and technologist with deep experience in ML/AI, NLP, sensors, mobile, computational bio, and decentralized technologies. Most recently, he was the founding VP of Product Development for conversational AI startup Semantic Machines which was acquired by Microsoft. Prior to that, he co-founded Locately and lead development of its location-based analytics technology from founding through successful acquisition. And earlier in his career, Drew was Director of Product Development at Endeca Technologies, a pioneer in search and unstructured database systems, acquired by Oracle for $1.1B. Drew holds an AB in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Millie Liu
Founding Partner
Millie Liu has focused her career on helping entrepreneurs with deep technology turn their ideas into great businesses with global reach.
She was previously at APT, an enterprise data analytics startup acquired by Mastercard for $600m where she helped Fortune 50 clients such as Walmart and P&G make better strategic decisions leveraging data. She was also the co-founder of an MIT startup working on unsupervised event detection, which later pivoted and became Infervision, an AI precision healthcare platform backed by Sequoia China. Millie is on the advisory board of MIT CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). She holds a Master of Finance degree from MIT and B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Toronto.


Teddy Blank
Partner
Teddy Blank has spent his career working to grow companies from their earliest days and answering the question of, "how do we get our first ten customers?". He was previously co-founder of Tempo, a secure, differential privacy-enabled marketplace for biometric data from top athletes.
Prior to starting Tempo, Teddy led Sales and BD for Symphony Commerce, an ecommerce service as a platform startup backed by $52m from CRV, Bain, and FirstMark which grew revenues to $10M+ ARR in less than three years.
Teddy began his career as an analyst at Accenture, working across industries from telecom to banking to public transit. He is an advisor to early-stage deep tech startups and loves the challenge of taking a business from zero to the moon. Teddy holds an MBA from Harvard University and a BA from Amherst College.
Our Statistics
Proud of track record as a top tier, pre-seed fund.

3 Partners
The opposite of a mega platform fund, First Star is a focused team of 3 who back founders with complete conviction, not optionality.

53 Startups
Across 3 funds, we've backed 53 startups (and counting...)

$3B Exit Value
Our partners have been involved with generating more then $3B in exit value as founders, executives, and investors.
We are the deep tech AI fund
Investing with conviction at the earliest stages in visionary, technical
founders inventing a better future with new computing technology.