Backing the next generation of Carnegie Mellon–founded companies.
Plaid Matrix Fund is a Carnegie Mellon University–backed seed and pre-seed venture fund investing in exceptional Carnegie Mellon founders across computing, robotics, AI, and engineering.
Supporting Carnegie Mellon University founders building category-defining businesses
Carnegie Mellon University is one of the world’s most concentrated sources of technical talent and innovation. Plaid Matrix Fund works closely with the CMU entrepreneurship ecosystem — including VentureBridge, the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, and the university’s alumni and research network — to help founders turn technical insight into category-defining companies.
What we do
Partnering with exceptional technical founders to build category-defining companies
Plaid Matrix Fund partners with exceptional Carnegie Mellon founders at the earliest stages of company formation. We support founders with aligned capital, experienced guidance, and access to the broader venture ecosystem—so technically ambitious ideas can grow into durable, category-defining companies.
Capital
Plaid Matrix Fund provides fast, founder-friendly seed and pre-seed capital to Carnegie Mellon–affiliated teams. Initial investments typically range from $100K to $500K, allowing founders to move quickly while staying focused on building. We invest early, with conviction, and with a long-term orientation around exceptional technical talent.
Partnership
Founders work directly with the General Partners and a trusted network of Carnegie Mellon alumni, operators, and investors who have built and supported dozens of early-stage companies. Our partnership is practical and hands-on, focused on product strategy, fundraising, hiring, and early go-to-market execution—tailored to the needs of technically driven teams.
Access
Plaid Matrix Fund helps founders build trusted relationships beyond the University. Through deep connections across the national venture and technology ecosystem—particularly in San Francisco and New York—we facilitate high-quality introductions to investors, partners, and customers as companies prepare to scale.
Portfolio
Plaid Matrix Fund partners with early-stage companies building innovative products across computing, robotics, AI, and engineering. Below are select companies we are proud to support.
April is a YC Summer ’25 and VentureBridge ’25 company building a voice-powered personal assistant to help people manage calendars and inboxes on the go. Co-founder Neha Suresh is a 2024 Carnegie Mellon master’s alumna.
Coheso Coheso builds AI-driven workflow software for in-house legal teams, enabling faster responses to routine questions and improving efficiency on more complex legal work. Co-founder Manish Agnihotri holds a Master’s degree in IT Strategy from Carnegie Mellon University.
Clear Solar Clear Solar is a VentureBridge ’25 company commercializing dust-remediation technology originally developed by NASA for use on terrestrial solar panels. Co-founder and CEO Michael Provenzano is a 2018 Tepper MBA alumnus
Boost Robotics Boost Robotics is a YC Spring ’25 company building robots for data center environments—an increasingly critical and under-automated market. The company was co-founded by Hardik Singh (CIT ’19, SCS ’23) and Hans Kumar (CIT ’19, SCS ’23).
Powerline Powerline is managing fixed site large scale batteries for the grid with Battery CoPilot. Battery CoPilot gives trading signals and tuning advice for the batteries, independent of the battery vendor. Founders Matineh Eybpoosh and JulianLamy have completed PhD’s from CMU.
Terrabyte Terrabyte is building an “earth search engine” powered by a proprietary geospatial foundation model that converts petabytes imagery into searchable embeddings. The company was co-founded by Rishi Madhok, who holds a Master’s in Computer Vision from the Robotics Institute.
Who we are
Experienced operators with deep Carnegie Mellon roots
Plaid Matrix Fund is led by two Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science alumni with decades of experience building, scaling, and investing in technically ambitious companies. The General Partners bring complementary backgrounds as founders, operators, and early-stage investors, along with a shared commitment to supporting the next generation of Carnegie Mellon entrepreneurs.
Michael Donohue
Michael Donohue is a Silicon Valley–based operator and investor with degrees in Computer Science and Political Science from Carnegie Mellon University. As one of the first eight engineers at WhatsApp, he helped scale the platform from 2 million to over 2 billion monthly active users, later serving five years as an Engineering Director at Facebook following its WhatsApp’s acquisition. He went on to co-found HalloApp, raising $14 million from Sequoia and other leading investors, and has built a personal portfolio of more than 60 pre-seed investments, including Motion AI, Frame.ai (acquired by HubSpot), and Addy AI. Since 2024, he has advised Carnegie Mellon’s Project Olympus incubator, bringing a founder’s intuition and product-first mindset to backing early-stage teams.
Jonathan Betz
Jonathan Betz is a New York City–based technology executive and investor with degrees in Computer Science and Cognitive Science from Carnegie Mellon University. An early Google employee, he led some of the company’s first efforts to extract structured data from the open web for use in search and later held senior engineering leadership roles at high-growth companies including Yext and Rent the Runway. From early 2023 through late 2024, he was co-founder and COO of Continua AI, backed by GV and Bessemer Venture Partners, and over the past 15 years has invested in more than 40 pre-seed startups, including Lucid Software, Mortar Data (acquired by Datadog), Remix (acquired by Via), Materia AI (acquired by Thomson Reuters), and Stellic.
Combined experience within the top technology companies and innovative technology start-ups.
The partners have made pre-seed investments in over one hundred start-ups in the past fifteen years.
The combined valuation of companies that Michael and Jonathan have invested in.