Investor
Derek Xiao
AI
SaaS
Infrastructure
Bio + Healthcare
As an investor at Menlo Ventures, Derek concentrates on identifying investment opportunities across the firm’s thesis areas, covering AI, cloud infrastructure, digital health, and enterprise SaaS. Derek is especially focused on investing in soon-to-be breakout companies at the inflection stage.
Derek joined Menlo from Bain & Company where he worked with leading San Francisco-based technology investors and companies spanning a broad range of industries. In one case, he advised a growth equity fund on potential investments in two rocket launch companies. That introduction to frontier tech and startups on the verge of hypergrowth sparked his desire to pursue venture capital.
Derek graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard with a Bachelor’s Degree in Government. During his time on campus, he served as President of the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. Battling strong headwinds associated with the decline of the print publication industry, Derek led the effort to return The Crimson to financial stability, bringing revenues to a decade high. Derek’s passion for media inspired him to begin his career as a journalist for Forbes.
During his free time, you can find Derek skiing in Tahoe or scanning Twitter for the latest commentary on the future of news. You can follow him at @derekgxiao.
Supported by: Nicole Sekeres, [email protected]
Investment Portfolio
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Milestones
-
2021 - Founded
-
2023 - Partnered, Series C
Leadership
Dario Amodei
Co-Founder & CEO
Daniela Amodei
Co-Founder & President
Partners
Cartwheel is a tech-enabled provider for youth mental health services, helping schools and families tackle the student mental health crisis.
Milestones
-
2022 - Founded
-
2023 - Partnered, Series A
Leadership
Joe English
Co-Founder & CEO
Daniel Tartakovsky
Co-Founder & COO
Partners
Graphite is an AI-powered developer productivity platform that helps developers create, review, and merge smaller code changes, stay unblocked, and ship faster.
Milestones
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2020 - Founded
-
2025 - Partnered, Series B
Leadership
Merrill Lutsky
CEO & Co-Founder
Tomas Reimers
CPO & Co-Founder
Greg Foster
CTO & Co-Founder
Partners
Mercor is an AI-powered hiring platform that matches talent with the opportunities they’re best suited for.
Milestones
-
2023 - Founded
-
2024 - Partnered, Series B
Leadership
Brendan Foody
CEO
Surya Midha
COO
Adarsh Hiremath
CTO
Partners
Neon is a multi-cloud Serverless Postgres provider that is purpose-built to address modern workloads oriented around edge computing and AI.
Milestones
-
2021 - Founded
-
2023 - Partnered, Series B
-
2025 - Acquired by Databricks
Leadership
Nikita Shamgunov
Co-Founder & CEO
Heikki Linnakangas
Co-Founder
Stas Kelvich
Co-Founder
Partners
Typeface is an enterprise-grade generative AI app to create engaging, personalized content faster and easier than ever before.
Milestones
-
2022 - Founded
-
2023 - Partnered, Series A
Leadership
Abhay Parasnis
Founder & CEO
Partners
Unstructured transforms organizations’ complex, unstructured data like PDFs, PPTX, HTML files, and more into formats compatible with LLMs so employees can chat with their internal data.
Milestones
-
2022 - Founded
-
2024 - Partnered, Series B
Leadership
Brian Raymond
Founder & CEO
Partners
Anthropic
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Cartwheel
Cartwheel is a tech-enabled provider for youth mental health services, helping schools and families tackle the student mental health crisis.
Eleos Health
Eleos Health leverages specialized clinical AI models to turn behavioral health conversations into documentation and care intelligence, reducing admin work by over 50% and improving outcomes 3–4x.
Eve
Eve is the industry’s first personalized AI assistant for the legal industry.
Graphite
Graphite is an AI-powered developer productivity platform that helps developers create, review, and merge smaller code changes, stay unblocked, and ship faster.
Higgsfield
Higgsfield is a video AI company dedicated to democratizing social media content creation to everyone.
Mercor
Mercor is an AI-powered hiring platform that matches talent with the opportunities they’re best suited for.
Neon
Neon is a multi-cloud Serverless Postgres provider that is purpose-built to address modern workloads oriented around edge computing and AI.
Acquired by Databricks
Obsidian Security
Obsidian aggregates, normalizes, and enriches user activity, access, and privilege data across SaaS applications to help organizations identify potential account compromise, data leakage, or insider threats.
OfferFit
OfferFit is a ML-powered, automated experimentation platform for lifecycle marketers that enables true mass personalization on a 1:1 basis, all tailored to the specific goal of the marketers.
Acquired by Braze
True Anomaly
True Anomaly is a deep technology company developing advanced hardware and software systems to ensure the sustainable security of space.
Typeface
Typeface is an enterprise-grade generative AI app to create engaging, personalized content faster and easier than ever before.
Unstructured
Unstructured transforms organizations’ complex, unstructured data like PDFs, PPTX, HTML files, and more into formats compatible with LLMs so employees can chat with their internal data.
