# Cathy Gao

> Cathy Gao is a Series C investor at Sapphire Ventures backing Software. See 12 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Sapphire Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/sapphire-ventures)
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 12
- Last investment: Aug 2025
- Lead investor: 42%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cathylgao
- X (Twitter): http://twitter.com/cgao
- Website: https://sapphireventures.com

Cathy Gao is a Series C investor at Sapphire Ventures in San Francisco focused on Software and Artificial Intelligence. Cathy Gao - Partner @ Sapphire Ventures

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 6 | 50% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 6 | 50% |
| Machine Learning | 5 | 42% |
| SaaS | 3 | 25% |
| Enterprise Software | 3 | 25% |

30 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Series C | 5 | 42% |
| Series D | 2 | 17% |
| Series E | 2 | 17% |
| Series A | 1 | 8% |
| Series B | 1 | 8% |

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 9 | 75% |
| Canada | 1 | 8% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| EliseAI | EliseAI provides artificial intelligence–powered automation and conversational services designed for housing and healthcare organizations. It offers a unified platform that manages communications across text, email, chat, and voice, handling tasks such as leasing inquiries, tenant maintenance requests, scheduling, renewals, and patientappointments. The system centralizes operations into modules like CRM, leasing, maintenance, delinquency handling, and healthcare-specific workflows, adapting to specialties such as women’s health, dermatology, ophthalmology, and orthopedics. It automates routine interactions, status updates, and follow-ups in multiple languages, aiming to reduce manual burden and streamline operational workflows. | $250M | Series E | Aug 19, 2025 |  |
| Blue J | Blue J is a legal technology company transforming tax research with generative AI. Its platform enables professionals to complete hours of tax research in seconds, delivering verifiable answers backed by authoritative sources and automating the drafting of high-quality communications. Trusted by leading firms across North America and the UK, Blue Jintegrates advanced language models with a curated tax content library to enhance efficiency and accuracy in tax advisory services. | $122M | Series D | Aug 04, 2025 |  |
| EliseAI | EliseAI provides artificial intelligence–powered automation and conversational services designed for housing and healthcare organizations. It offers a unified platform that manages communications across text, email, chat, and voice, handling tasks such as leasing inquiries, tenant maintenance requests, scheduling, renewals, and patientappointments. The system centralizes operations into modules like CRM, leasing, maintenance, delinquency handling, and healthcare-specific workflows, adapting to specialties such as women’s health, dermatology, ophthalmology, and orthopedics. It automates routine interactions, status updates, and follow-ups in multiple languages, aiming to reduce manual burden and streamline operational workflows. | $75M | Series D | Aug 14, 2024 |  |
| CaptivateIQ | CaptivateIQ makes commissions clear and accurate with a flexible, automated solution designed to save teams countless hours and costly errors. CaptivateIQ believes people are motivated by incentives which is why processing commissions correctly and in a timely manner can make or break team morale and company performance. The company's solutionhelps businesses design and measure the right incentive plans to keep their teams aligned and motivated. | $100M | Series C | Jan 26, 2022 |  |
| Paradox | Paradox is an AI company that helps companies capture and screen candidates, improve conversions, and answer all candidate questions. The company is helping HR and talent teams automate administrative tasks and deliver real-time candidate and employee communicationsParadox's flagship product is Olivia, the AI recruiting assistant obsessedwith improving and reinventing the candidate experience. It delivers one-to-one candidate experience at scale and even handles interview scheduling. It also allows talent acquisition and human resources professionals to focus on what they do best, human interaction, while focusing on experience, automation, and intelligence. | $200M | Series C | Dec 27, 2021 |  |
| Gem | Gem is an all-in-one recruiting platform that integrates with LinkedIn, Gmail & Outlook, and your ATS. It enables world-class recruiting teams to find, engage, and nurture top talent.Recruiters use Gem to build lists of people to reach out to, find an email, and automate follow-ups. Gem saves time, doubles response rate, and gives visibilityinto what’s working.Teams use Gem to collaborate on candidates, discover best practices, and never reach out to the same person twice. Managers unlock visibility into their team’s pipeline because every touchpoint is automatically tracked. And everything syncs to your applicant tracking system with best-in-class data integrity. | $100M | Series C | Sep 28, 2021 |  |
| Involve.ai | Involve is a customer intelligence platform that uses artificial intelligence to help businesses accelerate growth from existing data. It organizes all customer data and interactions in a single dashboard to quickly predict customer health, stop customers from leaving, and expand them to increase revenue. | $16M | Series A | Aug 25, 2021 |  |
| SafeGraph | SafeGraph builds and maintains data sets to help accelerate machine learning and AI. Its high-precision places data covers business listings, building footprints, and aggregated foot traffic data for millions of points of interest (POI) and thousands of brands in the US and Canada. With detailed brand affiliation, spatial hierarchy, and other keybusiness details, SafeGraph data informs market analytics, investment research, site selection, and more.It was founded in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, California. | $45M | Series B | Mar 16, 2021 |  |
| SafeGraph | SafeGraph builds and maintains data sets to help accelerate machine learning and AI. Its high-precision places data covers business listings, building footprints, and aggregated foot traffic data for millions of points of interest (POI) and thousands of brands in the US and Canada. With detailed brand affiliation, spatial hierarchy, and other keybusiness details, SafeGraph data informs market analytics, investment research, site selection, and more.It was founded in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, California. | $45M | Series B | Mar 16, 2021 |  |
| Splashtop | Splashtop delivers next-generation remote access and remote support software and services for enterprises, academic and research institutions, government agencies, small businesses, MSPs, IT departments, and individuals.Its cloud-based, secure, and easily managed remote access approach replaces legacy approaches such as virtual private networks(VPNs) while earning a stunning 93 Net Promoter Score (NPS), a standard for assessing customer satisfaction. Splashtop offers an enterprise-specific service that includes extra features, such as single-sign-on (SSO), with integrations for Microsoft Active Directory, JumpCloud, OKTA, OneLogin, and more. Moreover, companies can integrate Splashtop into enterprise services such as Salesforce, Jira, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and ServiceNow so support teams can help their end-users without having to switch from their help desk tool of choice. More than 30 million users, including those in 85% of Fortune 500 enterprises, enjoy Splashtop products globally.The San Jose, California-headquartered company was co-established by Mark Lee, Philip Sheu, Robert Ha, Thomas Deng, and Alex Lu in 2006. | $50M | Series E | Jan 27, 2021 |  |

10 of 12 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Accel](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/accel) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [GTMfund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/gtmfund) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Bessemer Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bessemer-venture-partners) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [DFJ DragonFund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/dfj-dragonfund) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Greylock](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/greylock) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [ICONIQ Growth](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/iconiq-growth) — VC Fund, 2 deals together

## About Sapphire Ventures

VC Fund · Palo Alto, United States

Sapphire is a global software venture capital firm with more than $11 billion in AUM and team members across Austin, London, Menlo Park and San Francisco. For over a decade, Sapphire has partnered with visionary management teams and venture funds to back companies of consequence. Since its founding, Sapphire has invested in more than 170 companiesglobally resulting in more than 30 Public Listings and 45 acquisitions. The firm’s investment strategies — Sapphire Ventures, Sapphire Partners and Sapphire Sport — are focused on scaling companies and venture funds, elevating them to become category leaders. Sapphire’s Portfolio Growth team of experienced operators delivers a strategic blend of value-add services, tools and resources designed to support portfolio company leaders as they scale.

5 contacts available at Sapphire Ventures.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Cathy Gao | Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/cathy-l-gao |
| Chloe Steinberg | Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/chloe-steinberg |
| Demilade Obayomi | Vice President | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/demilade-obayomi |
| Mahau Ma | Operating Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/mahau-ma |
| Adam Liu | Associate | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/adam-liu-bed3 |

## Similar investors

### Similar stage
- [Sequoia Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/sequoia-capital) — VC Fund
- [New Enterprise Associates](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/new-enterprise-associates) — VC Fund
- [Bessemer Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bessemer-venture-partners) — VC Fund

## FAQ

### What does Cathy Gao invest in?

Cathy Gao invests primarily in Software, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning startups, most often at Series C and Series D stage. Most of the 12 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### When did Cathy Gao last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Cathy Gao closed in Aug 2025. Shizune tracks 12 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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