# Timothy Chen

> Timothy Chen is a seed investor at Essence VC backing Software and Open Source. See 17 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Essence VC](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/essence-vc)
- Location: Greater Seattle Area, United States
- Total investments: 17
- Last investment: Nov 2025
- Lead investor: 0%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/timchen
- X (Twitter): http://twitter.com/tnachen
- Website: http://www.essencevc.fund

Timothy Chen is a seed investor at Essence VC in Greater Seattle Area focused on Software and Open Source. GP at Essence VC

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 9 | 53% |
| Open Source | 3 | 18% |
| Big Data | 2 | 12% |
| Analytics | 2 | 12% |
| Developer Tools | 2 | 12% |

25 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 10 | 59% |
| Pre-Seed | 4 | 24% |
| Series A | 2 | 12% |
| Series B | 1 | 6% |

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 11 | 65% |
| Denmark | 1 | 6% |
| Germany | 1 | 6% |
| United Kingdom | 1 | 6% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Infracost | Infracost creates cloud cost estimates for infrastructure as code in pull requests, so developers know how much their cloud resources will cost before launching them, creating a cost-aware engineering organization. | $18.8M | Series A | Nov 18, 2025 |  |
| Salus Cloud | Salus Cloud is an AI-native platform for engineers to develop and manage security. | $3.7M | Seed | Jun 10, 2025 |  |
| Recce | Solving the data context problem | $4M | Pre-Seed | Apr 22, 2025 |  |
| Nuon | Nuon helps you run your app on your customer's cloud. | $16.5M | Series A | Dec 17, 2024 |  |
| Platform Engineering Labs | Making Platform Engineering accessible for every engineer. |  | Pre-Seed | Dec 02, 2024 |  |
| Restate | Restate build workflows, event-driven applications, and distributed services in a fault-tolerant manner with durable async/await. | $7M | Seed | Jun 10, 2024 |  |
| Coana (acquired by Socket) | Coana helps software teams tackle the flood of alerts from traditional SCA tools. By using advanced reachability analysis, Coana cuts false alerts by over 80%, freeing up significant engineering time without sacrificing security. Coana is developed by leading program analysis researchers and is backed by Sequoia Capital and Essence VC. | $1.6M | Pre-Seed | Jan 23, 2024 |  |
| Nuon | Nuon helps you run your app on your customer's cloud. |  | Seed | Dec 09, 2022 |  |
| Commsor | Community scales your business, resources, and presence in ways that traditional marketing or advertising channels cannot. When done right, community enables and improves customer acquisition, streamlines support and success, bolsters retention, and provides crucial product insights. Visit https://commsor.com/ to learn more. | $50M | Series B | Mar 01, 2022 |  |
| Signadot | Signadot is a K8s-native platform for agentic validation that combines scalable ephemeral environments with a validation framework built for distributed systems to turn high-velocity agent code generation into safely merged pull requests. | $4M | Seed | Feb 23, 2022 |  |

10 of 17 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Redpoint](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/redpoint-ventures) — VC Fund, 7 deals together
- [Alumni Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alumni-ventures-group) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [Everywhere Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/everywhere-ventures) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [500 Global](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/500-startups) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [backtrace capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/backtrace-capital) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Cowboy Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/cowboy-ventures) — VC Fund, 2 deals together

## About Essence VC

VC Fund · Seattle, United States

Enterprise fund focusing on 1st time technical founders building in the infra / developer space

1 contacts available at Essence VC.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Timothy Chen | General Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/timothy-chen-3 |

## 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 Timothy Chen invest in?

Timothy Chen invests primarily in Software, Open Source and Big Data startups, most often at Seed and Pre-Seed stage. Most of the 17 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 Timothy Chen last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Timothy Chen closed in Nov 2025. Shizune tracks 17 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.

# About Shizune
Shizune.co is an investor database. Core features:
- 48,091 startup investors (angels, VCs, accelerators, and others)
- Email, phone, LinkedIn (for intros), socials, and other contact data
- Updated daily from public funding news
- CSV and Excel export

The User can access the full database FOR FREE after signing up: shizune.co