# John Chen

> John Chen is a seed investor at TechCrunch backing Software and Information Technology. See 6 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [TechCrunch](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/techcrunch)
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 6
- Last investment: Sep 2025
- Lead investor: 50%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnchen12/
- X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/thejohnchen
- Website: https://www.fika.vc

John Chen is a Partner at Fika Ventures and Columnist at TechCrunch.John has spent his entire early career working with SaaS entrepreneurs, both on the operating and investing side.John began his journey in the world of enterprise at Box, where he served as Chief of Staff to Aaron Levie. Having joined during the pre-IPO growth phase, John drovenumerous strategic initiatives in sales, marketing and business development including the launch of Box.org, which today serves over 9,000 nonprofits including The World Bank, Teach for America, Charity Water, and Kiva.Later, John joined Emergence Capital, a leading early stage venture capital firm in enterprise cloud. At Emergence, John co-led Series A investments in CrunchBase and SimpleLegal, where he served as Board Observer, and was also closely involved with Emergence’s investments in LogDNA, Project44, DroneDeploy, UpKeep, Guru, and Blend Labs.John holds a BA in Government from Harvard, and spent time working on open government products at Google, as well as Domestic Policy at The White House under the Obama Administration.When not in the office, you can find John on the tennis courts, writing his next piece on TechCrunch, or karaokeing in LA traffic.

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 3 | 50% |
| Information Technology | 3 | 50% |
| FinTech | 1 | 17% |
| Payments | 1 | 17% |
| Consulting | 1 | 17% |

11 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 3 | 50% |
| Series A | 3 | 50% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| MaxHome | MaxHome is an AI-native platform for real estate agents and brokerages. It offers AI-powered tools for real estate agents to streamline lead management and enhance customer experience. | $5M | Seed | Sep 25, 2025 |  |
| Spinwheel | Spinwheel is a software platform that helps Americans get out of debt sooner by embedding solutions in their favorite apps. The company's API infrastructure helps Americans connect, pay, and manage their debts in third-party apps and services. Spinwheel was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Oakland, California. | $30M | Series A | Jun 23, 2025 |  |
| Siro | Siro builds an AI Coach that identifies opportunities to elevate any sales team. Siro records reps’ in-person conversations and highlights the most critical moments to let reps hear how top performers handle difficult customer objections and empower coaches to support reps to a degree never before possible. The majority of the 5.7 million salesprofessionals in the U.S. work in field sales (i.e., any sales process involving a handshake), but most receive ZERO on-the-job coaching because it is too time-intensive. The company believes that with the right tooling, Field Sales can become the most accessible path to financial freedom. | $14M | Series A | Oct 25, 2023 |  |
| Siro | Siro builds an AI Coach that identifies opportunities to elevate any sales team. Siro records reps’ in-person conversations and highlights the most critical moments to let reps hear how top performers handle difficult customer objections and empower coaches to support reps to a degree never before possible. The majority of the 5.7 million salesprofessionals in the U.S. work in field sales (i.e., any sales process involving a handshake), but most receive ZERO on-the-job coaching because it is too time-intensive. The company believes that with the right tooling, Field Sales can become the most accessible path to financial freedom. | $4M | Seed | Oct 25, 2023 |  |
| DevZero | DevZero provides an autonomous compute and inference optimization platform that eliminates the usual tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and cost. The platform profiles, schedules, and rightsizes Kubernetes workloads with zero restarts and picks the best node for every pod, bringing cloud bills back to reality. The result: resilientapplications and AI workflows at costs that finally make sense. | $20.9M | Series A | Jan 01, 2023 |  |
| DevZero | DevZero provides an autonomous compute and inference optimization platform that eliminates the usual tradeoffs between performance, reliability, and cost. The platform profiles, schedules, and rightsizes Kubernetes workloads with zero restarts and picks the best node for every pod, bringing cloud bills back to reality. The result: resilientapplications and AI workflows at costs that finally make sense. | $5.1M | Seed | Jan 01, 2022 |  |

6 of 6 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Foundation Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/foundation-capital) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Index Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/index-ventures) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [F-Prime](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/f-prime-capital-partners) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Madrona](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/madrona-venture-group) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [QED Investors](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/qed-investors) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [1Sharpe Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/1sharpe-ventures) — VC Fund, 1 deal together

## About TechCrunch

VC Fund · San Francisco, United States

TechCrunch is an online magazine reporting on technology opinions, news, and analysis. TechCrunch was founded on June 11, 2005, is a blog dedicated to obsessively profiling and reviewing new Internet products and companies. In addition to covering new companies, TechCrunch profiles existing companies that are making an impact (commercialand/or cultural) on the new webspace.

5 contacts available at TechCrunch.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Chris Dixon | Contributing Writer | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/chris-dixon |
| Frederic Lardinois | Writer and News Editor | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/frederic-lardinois |
| Hillel Fuld | Contributing Writer | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/hillel-fuld |
| Jesse Chambers | Director of Sales, Operations & Monetization – AOL Tech | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/jesse-chambers |
| Jesse Stay | Columnist | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/jesse-stay |

## Similar investors

### Similar stage
- [Antler](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/antler-be9c) — VC Fund
- [Alumni Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alumni-ventures-group) — VC Fund
- [Right Side Capital Management](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/right-side-capital-management) — VC Fund

## FAQ

### What does John Chen invest in?

John Chen invests primarily in Software, Information Technology and FinTech startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 6 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 John Chen last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for John Chen closed in Sep 2025. Shizune tracks 6 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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