Derek Xiao
InvestorAI, Cloud Infrastructure, SaaS, 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, nicole@menlovc.com
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, nicole@menlovc.com
Investments
Our Portfolio
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Milestones
- 2021 → Founded
- 2023 → Partnered, Series C
Partner
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
Partner
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
Partner
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.
Milestones
- 2020 → Founded
- 2023 → Partnered, Series B
Partner
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
Partner
True Anomaly is a deep technology company developing advanced hardware and software systems to ensure the sustainable security of space.
Milestones
- 2022 → Founded
- 2023 → Partnered, Series B
Partner
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.
Milestones
- 2017 → Founded
- 2022 → Partnered, Series C
Partner
Anthropic is an AI safety and research company that builds reliable, interpretable, and steerable AI systems.
Milestones
- 2021 → Founded
- 2023 → Partnered, Series C
Partner
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
Partner
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.
Milestones
- 2020 → Founded
- 2023 → Partnered, Series B
Partner
Graphite is an AI-powered developer productivity platform that helps developers create, review, and merge smaller code changes, stay unblocked, and ship faster.
Milestones
- 2020 → Founded
- 2025 → Partnered, Series B
Partner
Higgsfield is a video AI company dedicated to democratizing social media content creation to everyone.
Milestones
- 2023 → Founded
- 2024 → Partnered, Seed
Partner
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.
Milestones
- 2017 → Founded
- 2022 → Partnered, Series C
Partner
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.
Milestones
- 2020 → Founded
- 2023 → Partnered, Series B
Partner
True Anomaly is a deep technology company developing advanced hardware and software systems to ensure the sustainable security of space.
Milestones
- 2022 → Founded
- 2023 → Partnered, Series B
Partner
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
Partner
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
Partner
