Ash Fontana
Associate @ Creative Destruction Lab
San Francisco, United States
Ash Fontana is a seed investor at Creative Destruction Lab in San Francisco focused on Software and Artificial Intelligence. Ash advises and invests in AI-First companies. He helps companies from inception onwards by advising on their data + ML, pricing and fundraising strategy. He invests anything from $20K to $20MM in a company. He also currently acts as a Special Advisor to Zetta Venture Partners, where he was a Managing Director from 2015 to 2021. Before Zetta, Ashlaunched AngelList’s fundraising platform that now manages over $7B. Prior to AngelList, he co-founded Topguest (acquired), a loyalty software platform that counted United Airlines, Hilton Worldwide, and Virgin America as clients. He started his career in growth investing at Macquarie Capital in New York after studying law at the University of Sydney. Penguin Random House has published his book, “The AI-First Company: How to Compete and Win with Artificial Intelligence”.
- Total investments:
- 19
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 37%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Ash Fontana invests in
Stages Ash Fontana invests in
Countries Ash Fontana invests in
Round sizes
Round size
- Seed
- $1.2M–$6.6M
- Pre-Seed
- $440k–$2.4M
- Series A
- $5M–$15M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Software 8 (42%)
- Artificial Intelligence 5 (26%)
- SaaS 4 (21%)
- Machine Learning 4 (21%)
- Analytics 3 (16%)
Stage
- Seed 7 (37%)
- Pre-Seed 4 (21%)
- Series A 4 (21%)
- Series C 2 (11%)
- Series B 1 (5%)
Country
- United States 8 (42%)
- Australia 2 (11%)
- India 1 (5%)
- Canada 1 (5%)
- Germany 1 (5%)
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
Zenode
|
AI PreCAD companion tool for Electrical Engineers | $500K / Pre-Seed / Mar 01, 2024 | |
QuantPi
|
QuantPi creates automated and scalable solutions for AI model explainability and robustness auditing. | $2.4M / Pre-Seed / Oct 07, 2022 | |
Tactiq
|
Tactiq is a knowledge base platform for remote meetings. It helps to transcribe meetings and enables remote teams to capture valuable meeting insights and share them throughout the organization. | $440K / Pre-Seed / Mar 01, 2021 | |
HASH
|
HASH enables the real-time modeling and simulation of complex systems. HASH's open-core platform allows developers and data scientists to quickly and easily construct simulations through composable parts, via a browser-based IDE and viewer for simulations. It was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in New York City. | $2.5M / Seed / Jun 18, 2020 | |
Clearbit
|
Clearbit develops business intelligence to help companies find more information of customers in order to increase sales and reduce fraud. Alex McCaw, Harlow Ward, and Rob Holland founded Clearbit in 2014, with its headquarters in San Francisco in California. | $15M / Series A / Mar 19, 2019 | |
Tractable
|
Tractable is a software company that develops artificial intelligence for accident and disaster recovery. Through the use of deep learning to automate visual damage appraisal, Tractable's AI looks at photos of the damage and predicts repair costs. By providing its AI to the largest insurers worldwide, Tractable helps to settle claims quicklyand efficiently, which in turn impacts livelihoods.Tractable AI Review and AI Estimating products help them improve their claims processes and produce live, end-to-end estimates of vehicle damage. Tractable’s pitch is that AI appraisals of damage to vehicles/property can take place via its platform “in minutes”, thereby allowing for repairs to begin sooner and people’s livelihoods to be restored more quickly. It also automates image recognition tasks with Deep Learning.The company was established in 2014 and is based in London, England. | $25M / Series B / Jul 06, 2018 | |
Constructor
|
Constructor.io is the only search and product discovery platform tailor-made for enterprise eCommerce where conversions matter. Constructor's cloud-based solutions use natural language processing, machine learning-enhanced results ranking, and collaborative personalization to deliver powerful user experiences across all facets of productdiscovery -- from search to browse, recommendations, autosuggest, quizzes, and attribute enrichment.We optimize revenue before relevance. This has allowed us to generate consistent $10M+ lifts for our customers, which include some of the biggest brands in retail like Sephora, American Eagle, Backcountry, Birkenstock, and Bonobos. Constructor is a remote-first company with employees around the world. We were founded in 2015 by Eli Finkelshteyn and Dan McCormick. | $5M / Seed / Oct 20, 2017 | |
Invenia
|
Invenia’s Energy Intelligence System is a cloud-based machine learning platform that uses big, high frequency data to solve complex problems in real time. Invenia currently applies its platform to optimize electric utility operations as well as electricity markets themselves.Invenia uses its intelligence system to link forecasting, patternrecognition, and optimization together with a model of the decision-making process specific to each user. This results in a decision recommendation, which is the best answer to the problem that the user is trying to solve at any given time. For energy markets, this process involves understanding the problem from generation through transmission and finally to marketing. This simplifies operational decision making, while making use of smart grid data, and becoming more efficient as the frequency of decisions increases. | $5M / Series A / May 10, 2017 | |
|
Tractable
|
Tractable is a software company that develops artificial intelligence for accident and disaster recovery. Through the use of deep learning to automate visual damage appraisal, Tractable's AI looks at photos of the damage and predicts repair costs. By providing its AI to the largest insurers worldwide, Tractable helps to settle claims quicklyand efficiently, which in turn impacts livelihoods.Tractable AI Review and AI Estimating products help them improve their claims processes and produce live, end-to-end estimates of vehicle damage. Tractable’s pitch is that AI appraisals of damage to vehicles/property can take place via its platform “in minutes”, thereby allowing for repairs to begin sooner and people’s livelihoods to be restored more quickly. It also automates image recognition tasks with Deep Learning.The company was established in 2014 and is based in London, England. | $8M / Series A / Jan 12, 2017 | |
Kaggle
|
Kaggle is the world's largest community of data scientists. They compete with each other to solve complex data science problems, using the latest and varied applications of machine learning. Kaggle provides cutting-edge business results to companies of all sizes, especially in the Energy sector. The company also has a track-record of solvingreal-world problems across an array of industries including life sciences, financial services, aviation, information technology, and retail. | $5M / Series A / Sep 04, 2015 | |
| See all 19 investments → | |||
Co-Investors
Marc Bell Ventures
2 deals together
415
1 deal together
Acequia Capital (AceCap)
1 deal together
ADT
1 deal together
Antler
1 deal together
Aslanoba Capital
1 deal together
About Creative Destruction Lab
Creative Destruction Lab (CDL) is a no-fee/no-equity organization that delivers an objectives-based mentoring program for massively scalable, pre-seed stage, science- and technology-based companies. Its nine-month program allows founders to learn from experienced entrepreneurs, increasing their likelihood of success. Founded in 2012 byProfessor Ajay Agrawal at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, the program has expanded to thirteen sites across seven countries: Seattle, Oxford, Paris, Atlanta, Estonia, Wisconsin, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal, Berlin, Melbourne and Halifax.
Creative Destruction Lab Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
Daniel Mulet Lind
Associate Director, Quantum Machine Learning
|
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Dennis Kavelman
Founding Partner and Associate
|
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Frederic Bastien
Fellow
|
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Mark Dobbin
Founding Partner and Fellow
|
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Nils Herrmann
Stream Lead AgriFood
|
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FAQ
What does Ash Fontana invest in?
Ash Fontana invests primarily in Software, Artificial Intelligence and SaaS startups, most often at Seed and Pre-Seed stage. Most of the 19 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
What is Ash Fontana's check size?
Ash Fontana typically joins rounds of $1.2M–$6.6M at Seed, $440k–$2.4M at Pre-Seed and $5M–$15M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Ash Fontana participates in.
When did Ash Fontana last invest?
The most recent investment recorded for Ash Fontana closed in Mar 2024. Shizune tracks 19 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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