Innovation Endeavors: The $1B+ VC Backed by Eric Schmidt, Behind Uber, Grammarly, and Boom Supersonic

The Origin Story

Innovation Endeavors was founded in 2012 by Karim Faris and Dror Berman, two investors who shared a conviction that the most consequential companies of the next decade would emerge at the intersection of hard science and bold entrepreneurship. The firm got an immediate credibility injection when Eric Schmidt—the former Google CEO and executive chairman—joined as a Founding Partner, bringing not just capital but a unique window into how platform companies scale.

What makes Innovation Endeavors different from the typical Sand Hill Road firm is the degree to which it treats science as a first-class input. Their team includes people with backgrounds in machine learning, computational biology, robotics, and climate engineering—not as consultants, but as full participants in the investment process. This isn't a VC firm that asks founders to explain their technology. They have the in-house expertise to evaluate whether a company's computational approach to protein folding, autonomous flight, or agricultural sensing actually holds water.

That scientific depth informs their sourcing too. Innovation Endeavors explicitly practices what they call deal flow from the edges—meaning they look for founders who are emerging from research labs, national labs, and academic programs rather than the usual founder circuits. The thinking is simple: if everyone is pitching you the same pitch decks, you've already missed the frontier.

The firm has grown to manage $1B+ across five funds, with Fund V closing at $630 million in 2023. They have the capital to write meaningful early checks (typically $1 million to $15 million) and the willingness to lead rounds when they believe in a thesis, rather than just co-investing as a passive participant.

Today, Innovation Endeavors remains one of the more intriguing early-stage firms for technical founders who are building at genuine technological frontiers—companies where a deep science substrate is the core competitive moat, not just a feature layered on top of a business.

Investment Focus and Thesis: The Super Evolution

Innovation Endeavors organizes its entire worldview around what they call the "Super Evolution"—a thesis that the convergence of three independent technology trends (massively available data, exponential growth in computational power, and advances in engineering disciplines like robotics and synthetic biology) is now powerful enough to rewrite entire industries from first principles.

Concretely, this means they look for companies deploying data and computation not as efficiencies layered onto an existing business, but as the foundational substrate that makes a fundamentally new category possible. Think of a company using machine learning to redesign protein synthesis from the ground up, or a ride-sharing platform that treats real-time routing data as a core product different from every competitor. The Super Evolution isn't about automation—it's about re-imagination.

Their portfolio reflects this thesis starkly. Uber wasn't backed because it was an app for rides—it was backed because it was a company that understood urban mobility as a data problem. Grammarly wasn't backed because grammar correction is a large market—it was backed because language intelligence was becoming something you could engineer at scale. Boom Supersonic isn't a legacy aerospace play; it's a company that treats supersonic flight as a materials and computational fluid dynamics challenge.

What they're specifically looking for is technical founders—people who can build the core technology themselves, not just sell it. They have a pronounced bias toward companies where the founders have a deep scientific or engineering background, and where the competitive moat is rooted in know-how that can't be easily replicated by a well-funded incumbent.

Sector-wise, they've been particularly active in life sciences (Zymergen, which engineered microbes for materials; Plenty, which grows produce in indoor vertical farms), climate tech (Boom Supersonic, Planet's satellite imaging constellation), and financial technology (SoFi). But the common thread isn't sector—it's whether a company is using the Super Evolution stack to make something genuinely new.

Recent Investment Activity

Innovation Endeavors closed its fifth fund at $630 million in 2023, a meaningful step up from prior vehicles that signals LPs' continued confidence in their edge-based sourcing model and scientific evaluation framework. The firm has been deploying actively into 2024 and 2025, with notable recent deals across synthetic biology, climate infrastructure, and defense technology.

In 2023 alone, they co-led or participated in rounds for companies operating at genuine scientific frontiers—BioLoomics (which uses AI-driven protein degradation for drug discovery), FutureProof (a company working at the intersection of insurance and large-scale data modeling), and several stealth-stage ventures that haven't yet disclosed publicly.

The firm has also expanded its thesis to include what they describe as "AI-native companies"—not companies adding AI features, but companies where the core product is constructed around large models and where the competitive differentiation lives in the model's training data, inference architecture, or domain-specific fine-tuning. This is a natural evolution of their original thesis, and one that aligns with the broader Super Evolution framework.

One notable shift: the firm has become more willing to lead rounds at the Series A stage in recent vintages, not just seed. As their early portfolio companies have matured and exited profitably, Innovation Endeavors has demonstrated that they can write the larger checks required for post-seed scaling—and can add real value in go-to-market strategy, not just technology evaluation.

Notable Portfolio Companies

Innovation Endeavors' portfolio is a curated tour through some of the last decade's most consequential technology bets. The crown jewel is Uber—the ride-sharing and logistics platform that became one of the most valuable private companies in history and a defining example of turning urban mobility into a data product. Innovation Endeavors was an early investor, before Uber's valuation reached the tens of billions.

Grammarly is another standout. The AI-powered writing assistant has grown into a daily tool for tens of millions of users and countless businesses, reflecting Innovation Endeavors' thesis that language intelligence—understanding, generating, and correcting human text at scale—is a fundamental compute problem with a massive market. The company has become one of the most valuable private SaaS businesses in the world.

Boom Supersonic represents the firm's appetite for audacious engineering bets. The company is developing the Overture supersonic passenger jet, targeting speeds of Mach 2.2 and airline operation by the end of the decade. Innovation Endeavors invested behind the conviction that materials science, computational fluid dynamics, and advanced manufacturing have finally converged to make commercial supersonic flight economically viable.

Aircall, the cloud-based phone system built for modern sales and support teams, is another portfolio company that has matured into a significant business—helping companies manage voice communications as naturally as they manage email or chat. It reflects Innovation Endeavors' belief that enterprise communication infrastructure was overdue for a rebuild on web-native architecture.

SoFi (Social Finance) was an early bet on the idea that a new generation of Americans deserved a challenger bank built from the ground up for digital-native financial services—student loan refinancing, personal lending, and investment products without the legacy infrastructure of traditional banks. SoFi went public via SPAC in 2021.

Mugen is a Japanese company that is pushing the boundaries of EV battery technology, specifically in the area of solid-state batteries. This aligns with Innovation Endeavors' broader interest in energy transformation and their belief that next-generation energy storage will be a defining competitive battleground for the next twenty years.

AdRoll, the marketing attribution and retargeting platform, was an early bet on the idea that digital advertising measurement could be rebuilt as a data science problem rather than a media buying problem. The company grew to serve thousands of e-commerce brands before being acquired.

CropX is an Israeli agtech company that uses sensor data and analytics to help farmers optimize irrigation, fertilizer application, and soil management. It exemplifies the Super Evolution thesis: applying real-time data and computation to an industry that has historically operated on intuition and tradition.

Planet Labs operates the largest constellation of Earth-observation satellites in history, imaging the entire planet's land surface every day. This is a company treating the physical Earth as a data problem—using remote sensing to generate insights about agriculture, climate, urban development, and natural disasters at a scale never before possible.

Zymergen was a pioneering synthetic biology company that engineered microbes to produce novel materials through a combination of machine learning, lab automation, and microbial genetics. Though the company faced challenges post-IPO, it remains a landmark example of applying the Super Evolution stack to materials science.

Plenty is rethinking indoor agriculture from first principles—using machine learning, LED lighting optimization, and closed-loop environmental control to grow produce with a fraction of the land and water required by conventional agriculture. It represents Innovation Endeavors' conviction that food production is a computational problem as much as an agricultural one.

What Innovation Endeavors Looks For

Innovation Endeavors is explicit about what catches their eye: founders who are technically deep, working on problems that matter at scale, and leveraging the convergence of data, computation, and engineering in a fundamental way. The first filter is almost always the team—specifically, whether the founder is building something they genuinely understand at the component level, not just managing contractors who understand it.

They have a strong preference for "full-stack" technical teams—companies where the founding group includes both the scientific or engineering talent to build the core technology AND the operational experience to navigate go-to-market. A brilliant researcher who can't talk to a customer is not their ideal founder, but a technical founder who has thought hard about distribution, pricing, and adoption is extremely interesting.

The market size requirement is non-negotiable. Innovation Endeavors is not interested in niche applications or incremental improvements to existing categories. They want to back companies that could become enormous—sectors worth tens of billions of dollars where incumbents are vulnerable to new, technology-first entrants.

They look for genuine defensibility. This can come from proprietary datasets, from a proprietary computational approach that compounds over time, or from a deep engineering moat that would require a potential competitor five-plus years and hundreds of millions of dollars to replicate. "Network effects" as a moat is interesting but not sufficient on its own—they want to see technical substrate.

One specific thing they avoid: companies that are purely business-model plays. If your differentiation is primarily in go-to-market, pricing, or customer service rather than in underlying technology, you are probably not the right fit for Innovation Endeavors. They are not a growth-stage or business-model-focused fund.

How to Connect With Innovation Endeavors

The single most effective way to get Innovation Endeavors' attention is a warm introduction from someone in their portfolio network, an academic collaborator of one of their partners, or a fellow investor who knows their thesis deeply. The firm's sourcing philosophy is built on edge relationships—they actively cultivate connections with research institutions, national labs, and technical communities where unconventional founders tend to emerge.

Cold outreach is not automatically fruitless, but it needs to come with clear evidence that you are working at genuine scientific or technological frontiers, and that you have the data or early results to prove the underlying thesis. A vague "AI for X" pitch without a clear explanation of why the approach is novel or defensible will not generate a meeting.

If you are a technical founder working on a deep-tech problem—particularly in life sciences, climate tech, logistics, or financial infrastructure—and you have meaningful early traction (a working prototype, published research, or a clear experimental result), your cold outreach should highlight those specifics upfront. Lead with the science.

The firm has been known to move quickly when they see something that fits their thesis clearly. Unlike larger firms with months-long processes, Innovation Endeavors has the capacity to make decisions relatively quickly for the right opportunity, particularly at the seed stage where the investment committee overhead is lighter.

Follow-up matters. If you've submitted materials and haven't heard back within three to four weeks, a brief and respectful check-in is appropriate. Don't be pushy, but do make sure they have everything they need to evaluate your opportunity.

The Value of Financial Rigor for Deep-Tech Fundraising

Technical founders often assume that deep scientific differentiation is enough to get funded. It isn't—not fully. Investors like Innovation Endeavors are rigorous about the commercial thesis too, and they expect founders to have a credible financial model even at the earliest stages.

This means you should be able to articulate your path to meaningful revenue—not just in TAM slides, but in the specific sales motion, unit economics, and customer acquisition dynamics that will actually get you there. For deep-tech companies especially, the timeline from lab to commercial product can be long and capital-intensive; being realistic about that timeline and having a plan to navigate it signals maturity.

A fractional CFO can be a meaningful asset for a technical founder preparing to raise. Whether it's building a credible financial model, preparing investor-ready dashboards, or stress-testing your assumptions about burn rate and runway, professional financial infrastructure communicates that you understand your business as well as you understand your technology.

Our team has worked with founders across deep-tech, SaaS, and consumer businesses to prepare for venture fundraising. We can help you structure your financial narrative so that it complements your technical story rather than distracting from it—and ensures you can answer the commercial diligence questions as confidently as the scientific ones.

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