Sandhya Venkatachalam

Sandhya Venkatachalam is founder and managing partner of Axiom Partners, an AI-focused venture firm she launched in 2024. Before that she was a partner at Khosla Ventures and Social Capital, according to Metis Strategy.

Machine Learning Products at Skype

Early in her career she worked in corporate development at Cisco. She also helped build early machine learning products at Skype.

Backing Groq Before Its Rise

According to Business Insider, she was an early investor in the chipmaker Groq. At Axiom she makes what she calls nonconformist bets on very young AI startups. "Contrarian and wrong is relatively useless," she said.

Following Google's Chips to Jonathan Ross

Venkatachalam got curious about why Google was building its own networking switches, and learned it was building its own chips too, she told Crunchbase News. That led her to Jonathan Ross, who had left to start Groq. "I'll be honest: In 2016, I barely understood inference," she said.

Planning for Half of Axiom's Bets to Fail

Axiom is a $52 million fund backing startups that use AI to do work in industries such as construction, industrials and insurance. It expects to make 35 investments and about half to fail. The firm has built what she calls the Axiom Brain to track market trends and move faster on diligence.