Mission-driven founders forge the future

At Future Ventures, we support passionate founders who are forging the future. For the past 25 years, we have backed the visionaries who push the boundaries of possibility and explore the frontier of the unknown.

We focus on seed and early-stage investments in trailblazing, purpose-driven entrepreneurs with unique ideas that have the potential to reinvent entire industries.

As venture capitalists, the Future Ventures partners have led founding investments in several companies that had successful IPOs and others that were billion-dollar acquisitions. Some of our early VC investments include Boring Company, Commonwealth Fusion, D-Wave, Planet, Skype, SpaceX, Tesla and Upside Foods.  Here are some of those founding stories, representing $1.7 trillion of aggregate value creation.

You can follow us on Facebook, Twitter or our photo blog, listen to the long-form podcast interview,  or read some of our thoughts on deep learning and manufacturing meat without animals, or browse our collection of Apollo space artifacts or rocketry gone wild.

Maryanna Saenko

Maryanna Saenko is an early-stage venture capitalist and co-founder of Future Ventures. She invests in frontier technologies that make the world better and don’t prey on human frailty. Recent investments have been across a wide swath of sectors, including nuclear fusion, sustainable agricultural and land management, bee immunology, women’s reproductive longevity, and the application of AI to everything from the construction industry to medical therapeutics. Previously, she was at Khosla Ventures, and before that, DFJ. She was also an investment partner at Airbus Ventures, leading a series of venture investments strategically aligned with Airbus’ future-of-aerospace initiatives. Before Airbus, Maryanna was a Lux Research consultant and a Cabot Corporation research engineer. She’s worked on lunar rovers, martian landers, driverless cars, and long-range low-frequency communication systems.

Maryanna graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BS in BioMedical Engineering and a BS and MS in Materials Science and Engineering. 

NICO Enriquez

Nico Enriquez joined Future Ventures as a principal while completing his Stanford MBA. He studied synthetic neurobiology at Brown University, published peer articles with a Nobel Prize winner, and ran his start-up for several years, earning Forbes 30Under30. Nico sold his company and started a pivot into deep tech by earning a prestigious Fellowship at the Advanced Research Projects Agency of the Department of Energy, where he worked for the Director of Commercialization.