While working two jobs in her twenties as an engineer at Google and part-time investor at Bessemer Venture Partners, Casey Caruso started to develop an investment thesis: “Tech is changing so fast that if you don’t fully understand it, you kind of just lose the plot.”
Based on this conviction—that investors who better understand the increasing complexity of technology are poised for success—Caruso, 31, has raised $75 million for a new fund called Topology Ventures. It will invest in frontier tech, which she defines as startups that can “make science fiction reality,” including AI, decentralized networks, neurotechnology, aerospace, and robotics. Cendana Capital and Accolade Partners anchor the fund, which is three times oversubscribed. Other limited partners include Marc Andreessen of a16z; Bob Goodman, a managing partner of Bessemer; Ethan Kurzweil, a Bessemer alum who now has the fund Chemistry; a cofounder of OpenAI; a coauthor of GPT-4; and Paris Hilton. (Caruso declined to make public which cofounder of OpenAI invested, but says it was his first fund investment and he is still at the company.)
