Future Ventures

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.

“The best way to change the future is to invent it.”

Alan Kay

"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams."

Eleanor Roosevelt

Steve Jurvetson

Steve Jurvetson is an early-stage venture capitalist with a focus on founder-led, mission-driven companies at the cutting edge of disruptive technology and new industry formation. Steve led founding investments in several companies that had successful IPOs and others that were billion-dollar acquisitions, representing $1.7 trillion of aggregate value creation. Some of those early VC investments include Planet Labs, SpaceX and Tesla.

Before co-founding Future Ventures and Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Steve was an R&D Engineer at Hewlett-Packard, where seven of his chip designs were fabricated. He also worked in product marketing at Apple and NeXT and management consulting with Bain & Company. He completed his undergraduate Electrical Engineering degree at Stanford in 2.5 years, graduating #1 in his class, and went on to earn a MSEE and MBA from Stanford.

In 2017, Steve received the Visionary Award from SV Forum. In 2016, President Barack Obama appointed Steve as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship. Steve has also been honored as one of "Tech's Best Venture Investors" by Forbes, and as the “Venture Capitalist of the Year” by Deloitte.

Maryanna Saenko

Maryanna Saenko is an early-stage venture capitalist and cofounder of Future Ventures. She invests in frontier technologies that make the world a better place, 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 prior to that DFJ. She was also an investment partner at Airbus Ventures where she led a series of venture investments strategically aligned with Airbus’ future-of-aerospace initiatives. Before Airbus, Maryanna was a consultant at Lux Research and a research engineer at Cabot Corporation. 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.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Albert Einstein