Playground Global
VC Fund
Palo Alto, United States
Playground Global is an early-stage venture capital firm backing technical and scientific founders with deep engineering expertise, a collaborative environment, and a first-hand understanding of the intricacies of deep tech. Established in 2015 and headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, Playground’s mission is to transform ambitious ideas into impactful businesses that benefit humanity and the planet. We invest in areas that span across next gen compute automation, energy transition and engineered biology. Playground has been an early – and frequently first investor – in companies that include PsiQuantum, Relativity Space, Ultima Genomics, MosaicML (acq. by Databricks), d-Matrix, and Strand Therapeutics.
- Total investments:
- 155
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 50%
- Fund size:
- $475M
- Last fund:
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Playground Global invests in
Stages Playground Global invests in
Countries Playground Global invests in
Round sizes
Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
| See all 14 contacts → | |||
Round size
- Seed
- $2.3M–$14M
- Series A
- $8M–$44M
- Series B
- $20M–$150M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Software 21 (14%)
- Artificial Intelligence 17 (11%)
- Robotics 14 (9%)
- Biotechnology 14 (9%)
- Health Care 11 (7%)
Stage
- Series A 50 (32%)
- Seed 30 (19%)
- Series B 29 (19%)
- Series C 12 (8%)
- Venture - Series Unknown 8 (5%)
Country
- United States 73 (47%)
- Canada 3 (2%)
- Australia 2 (1%)
- United Kingdom 2 (1%)
- Italy 1 (1%)
Team
| Name | Title | Investments | Links | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
Jeffrey Freburg
VP of Operations and Real Estate and Head of Employee Experience
|
VP of Operations and Real Estate and Head of Employee Experience | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
Matthew Hershenson
Founding Partner, Co-Founder, and General Partner
|
Founding Partner, Co-Founder, and General Partner | Total investments: 9 | Find email | |
Phyllis Whiteley
Venture Partner
|
Venture Partner | Total investments: 1 | Find email | |
Bruce Leak
Co-Founder, Founding Partner & General Partner
|
Co-Founder, Founding Partner & General Partner | Total investments: 17 | Find email | |
Greg Wilson
CFO
|
CFO | Total investments: 0 | Find email | |
| See all 14 team members → | ||||
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mesa Quantum is an electronics manufacturing company that provides quantum sensors and integrable chip-scale technology solutions. | $11.8M / Venture - Series Unknown / Sep 24, 2026 | ||
| Delos Data develops infrastructure technology for large-scale artificial intelligence workloads. The company focuses on addressing networking and memory bottlenecks in massive AI data centers by moving away from legacy high-performance computing and traditional cloud architectures. Its teams design custom software, systems, and silicon interconnects tailored for AI workloads, improving how compute tasks are distributed and how memory layers are interconnected. Delos Data offers the Nonstop AI platform, an architecture that optimizes memory connections across large GPU clusters to support fast, resilient inference domains. It also provides the Delos Mosaic software stack, which delivers real-time cluster analytics to detect bottlenecks and automatically reroute workflows during GPU or cable failures. These offerings target organizations building or operating advanced AI infrastructure that require improved performance, reliability, and scalability. | $100M / Series A / Sep 15, 2026 | ||
| RegCell aims to generate novel therapeutic technologies through augmenting or controlling the immune system and our goal is to save patients who suffer from autoimmune diseases and cancer . | $44M / Series A / Sep 15, 2026 | ||
| Infinimmune operates as a biotechnology company. Infinimmune reinvents antibody discovery with an end-to-end platform to deliver antibody drugs derived directly from the human immune system. | $75M / Series A / Aug 11, 2026 | ||
| Prazer Therapeutics assists patients suffering from intractable diseases through the use of logical and innovative drug design approaches. They willaccomplished this through the use of new and innovative drug development platforms, such as rational molecular drug design technology and next-generation protein degradation technology. | $33.9M / Venture - Series Unknown / Jul 23, 2026 | ||
| Photon Queue's focus on efficient all-optical quantum memories is crucial for advancing quantum technology. Photon Queue enhances the performance and scalability of quantum systems. | $4M / Seed / Jul 21, 2026 | ||
| NVision is pioneering a new generation of quantum systems designed to bring quantum computing and quantum sensing out of the lab and into the real world, transforming how diseases are understood, detected, and treated.We engineer and control the quantum properties of organic molecules, integrating molecular design and quantum hardware intoscalable products.Our POLARIS platform uses quantum-based hyperpolarization to enable real-time metabolic MRI with more than 10,000x signal enhancement, supporting non-invasive, early-stage disease detection and treatment monitoring.In 2026, we introduced PIQC (Photonic Integrated Quantum Circuits), a fundamentally new quantum computing architecture that combines molecular qubits with photonic integrated circuits to enable scalable biological modeling and next generation drug discovery.At NVision, we see these technologies converging into a new “compute and validate” paradigm, where quantum systems are used both to design therapies and to measure their biological impact. | $38M / Series B / May 13, 2026 | ||
| Enabling the transition to 2.5D and 3D chiplet stacking and increasing the performance of semiconductor chips to meet the growing demand. | $25.9M / Series A / Mar 23, 2026 | ||
| Alva Energy specializes in nuclear plant upgrades called "uprates" to boost clean power output from existing U.S. reactors. It standardizes complex retrofits into repeatable, turnkey projects for faster and cheaper deployment. | $33M / Series A / Feb 12, 2026 | ||
| PicoJool developed a new class of pixel-level photonics that make optical links inexpensive, compact, and manufacturable. | $12M / Venture - Series Unknown / Nov 18, 2025 | ||
| See all 155 investments → | |||
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FAQ
What does Playground Global invest in?
Playground Global invests primarily in Software, Artificial Intelligence and Robotics startups, most often at Series A and Seed stage. Most of the 155 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
What round sizes does Playground Global invest in?
Playground Global typically joins rounds of $2.3M–$14M at Seed, $8M–$44M at Series A and $20M–$150M at Series B. These are whole funding-round sizes, not Playground Global's own check, which is rarely disclosed: the 10th–90th percentile of the confirmed public funding rounds Playground Global took part in.
How do I contact Playground Global?
Public channels for Playground Global include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
Who are the partners at Playground Global?
The team at Playground Global includes Jeffrey Freburg (VP of Operations and Real Estate and Head of Employee Experience), Matthew Hershenson (Founding Partner, Co-Founder, and General Partner) and Phyllis Whiteley (Venture Partner), among 14 team members tracked by Shizune. The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.
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 Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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