# Walden Catalyst

> Walden Catalyst is a VC fund backing Artificial Intelligence and Software. See 39 investments, check sizes, portfolio and contact details. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: VC Fund
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 39
- Last investment: Jun 2026
- Lead investor: 51%
- Fund size: $550M
- Last fund: Nov 2021
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/walden-catalyst-ventures/
- Website: https://waldencatalyst.com

Walden Catalyst is a VC fund in San Francisco focused on Artificial Intelligence and Software. Walden Catalyst provides early-stage investments and operational expertise in data, deep tech, AI, cloud, and digital biology.The venture capital firm is a legacy from Walden International and Samsung Catalyst Fund. It is committed to leveraging its operational and investing experience to help early-stage entrepreneurs rapidly scale and innovateas they build the next generations of businesses. Walden Catalyst partners with the next wave of industry visionaries to help entrepreneurs unlock innovation and accelerate growth.

## Contacts

5 contacts available for Walden Catalyst. Shizune tracks 6 team members at Walden Catalyst. Sign up free to unlock them: https://app.shizune.co/sign-up/investor-profiles/find-team-emails/walden-catalyst?utm_source=investor_profile

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Artificial Intelligence | 10 | 26% |
| Software | 7 | 18% |
| Manufacturing | 4 | 10% |
| Hardware | 3 | 8% |
| Analytics | 3 | 8% |

45 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 10 | 26% |
| Series A | 8 | 21% |
| Series B | 7 | 18% |
| Series C | 3 | 8% |
| Series D | 3 | 8% |

7 stages tracked in total.

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 14 | 36% |
| Israel | 3 | 8% |
| India | 2 | 5% |
| Singapore | 1 | 3% |
| Switzerland | 1 | 3% |

7 countries tracked in total.

## Team

| Name | Title | Investments | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Francis Ho | Managing Director | 3 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/francis-ho-2 |
| Nicolas Autret | Partner | 4 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/nicolas-autret |
| Dr Carina Tyrrell | Investor and Chief of Staff | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/filippo-falaschi |
| Lip-Bu Tan | Managing Partner | 99 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/lip-bu-tan |
| Victoria Slivkoff | Head of Ecosystem | 0 | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/victoria-slivkoff |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Nearfield Instruments | Nearfield Instruments develops and markets High-Throughput Scanning Probe Metrology systems for advanced integrated circuits manufacturing process control. | $380M | Series D | Jun 22, 2026 |  |
| Amperesand | Amperesand operates as a grid infrastructure solution provider. | $30M | Venture - Series Unknown | Jun 02, 2026 |  |
| Nace.AI | Nace.AI system generates small, task-specific AI models, offering enterprises alternative to traditional large language models. | $21.5M | Seed | May 05, 2026 |  |
| NeoCognition | NeoCognition is an AI research lab specializing in self-learning AI agents that achieve expert-level intelligence through autonomous adaptation to specific domains. company develops generalist agents that continuously learn workflows, structures, and constraints in real-world environments like software and websites. This enables them to specializeon the job, becoming faster, more cost-effective, reliable, and safer for high-stakes applications—addressing reliability issues in current AI systems that succeed only about 50% of the time. | $40M | Seed | Apr 21, 2026 |  |
| Opaque Systems | Opaque is a startup that helps organizations analyze encrypted data in the cloud. Opaque Systems offers a service for secure data analytics and machine learning in the cloud. Opaque commercializes the open source MC2 Platform, which leverages a novel combination of two key technologies layered on top of state-of-the-art cloud security—securehardware enclaves and cryptographic fortification. | $24M | Series B | Feb 12, 2026 |  |
| RadixArk | RadixArk focuses on developing infrastructure for AI inference and training systems. It builds tools to make frontier-level AI more efficient, accessible, and cost-effective. | $100M | Seed | Jan 21, 2026 |  |
| Amperesand | Amperesand operates as a grid infrastructure solution provider. | $80M | Series A | Nov 18, 2025 |  |
| Empower Semiconductor | Empower Semiconductor is dedicated to enabling the design of high-efficiency, integrated voltage regulators (VR) in SoCs. Their world-class team has developed a patent-pending breakthrough power management architecture that is redefining the cost, size, and energy efficiency of voltage regulators for applications ranging from low-power mobiledevices to the higher-powered servers and communications systems. | $140M | Series D | Sep 22, 2025 |  |
| Tryndbuy | Try & Buy is a deep tech company in the area of computer vision and artificial intelligence and has developed applications such as virtual try –on of dresses, face recognition based surveillance and face recognition based payment. Try & Buy's technology is protected by its more than 70 International Patents , out of which 9 Patentsare granted in US. Try & Buy is the winner of Amazon's Innovator of the Year 2020 Award for making World's Most Advanced Virtual Trial Room. The company has developed proprietary software which offers virtual try-on solutions to be implemented at fashion e-commerce platforms and offline stores. Through the plug-ins, shoppers can try-on clothes virtually while browsing online . At offline stores , users can interface with Try & Buy’s virtual try on screens. | $5.5M | Seed | Jul 10, 2025 |  |
| Speedata - The Analytics Processing Unit (APU) | Speedata is the creator of the Analytics Processing Unit (APU), the first processor purpose-built for Apache Spark SQL, batch ETL, and AI data preparation workloads. By executing Spark operations natively in silicon rather than memory, the APU delivers up to 100x faster performance and 90% lower total cost of ownership compared to general-purposecompute - with zero code changes required. In one enterprise AI data preprocessing deployment, customers replaced 38 servers with just 3. Speedata integrates directly into existing data pipelines, accelerating the most demanding analytics and AI data layer workloads at scale. Try our Workload Analyzer to see the APU in action —> https://www.speedata.io/workload-analyzer | $44M | Series B | Jun 03, 2025 |  |

10 of 39 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Bessemer Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bessemer-venture-partners) — VC Fund, 7 deals together
- [Lightspeed Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/lightspeed-venture-partners) — VC Fund, 7 deals together
- [Pitango VC](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/pitango-venture-capital) — VC Fund, 6 deals together
- [Intel Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/intel-capital) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [NGP Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/nokia-growth-partners) — VC Fund, 5 deals together
- [Cambium Capital Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/cambium-capital-partners) — VC Fund, 4 deals together

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## FAQ

### What does Walden Catalyst invest in?

Walden Catalyst invests primarily in Artificial Intelligence, Software and Manufacturing startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 39 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### How do I contact Walden Catalyst?

Public channels for Walden Catalyst include LinkedIn 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 Walden Catalyst?

The team at Walden Catalyst includes Francis Ho (Managing Director), Nicolas Autret (Partner) and Dr Carina Tyrrell (Investor and Chief of Staff), among 6 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 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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