We Leverage Deep Operating & Investing Experience to Help Our Founders Scale

Dipak is an investor at Virta Ventures, bringing a wealth of experience from private equity, foundations, and policy. Before joining Virta, he was a Senior Analyst at the Draper Richards Kaplan Foundation, where he played a key role in co-developing the firm's climate investment strategy and leading diligence on high-impact deals. His career began in private equity at Cove Hill Partners, specializing in technology investments. Dipak also served as a Dukakis Fellow in the communications office of Maryland Governor Wes Moore. He is currently pursuing a joint MBA/MPP at Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School, and he graduated Summa Cum Laude with a B.S. in Economics from the Wharton School at Penn.

Sam is a Venture Partner with Virta, supporting across sourcing, diligence, and support for Virta’s entire strategy. Sam brings over 15 years of investing and operating experience across energy, industrial technology, and the modernization of traditional sectors. He most recently co-founded and built Positive Sum, a research-oriented VC firm that raised $600M across its first three funds and invested in 30+ companies that have created over $30B in enterprise value since Sam’s initial investment. That portfolio includes Base Power, Etched, Skyryse, Vanta, and Eight Sleep.

Prior to launching Positive Sum, Sam spent over a decade at General Electric across its industrial businesses and at GE Ventures, where he and Russell first crossed paths nearly a decade ago investing around energy modernization. During his time at GE Ventures, Sam led or supported investments in companies including Xometry, TTTech, and Bit Stew. The combination of large-company operating experience and early-stage firm-building has been central to his perspective as an investor — and the foundation of a long-standing working relationship with Russell that made joining Virta a natural fit.

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Logan Ashcraft is a Venture Partner with Virta, supporting across sourcing, diligence, and support for Virta's deeptech and hardware strategy. Logan is currently Head of Strategic Finance at Quaise Energy - the world’s first superhot rock geothermal developer to reach commercial relevance.

Prior to Quaise, she led the climate and national security investment strategy at Standard Investments, a multistage family office with ~$4B AUM. Prior to Standard, she held investment roles at Congruent Ventures and Centrica Innovations. She has over a decade of experience working across North America, Central America, Southeast Asia, and Southern Africa.

Logan is a Kauffman Fellow and Schmidt Futures International Strategy Forum Fellow. She earned two Bachelor’s degrees from Johns Hopkins University and a Master’s degree from Yale University. Logan is a competitive sailor and one of few female skippers in the worldwide J/88 sportsboat class.

Garrett is a Venture Partner with Virta, supporting on firm building strategy and execution. Garrett brings over a decade of venture investing and operating experience. He is currently a co-Founder and General Partner at Potion Capital in Paris. Recently he was COO of Wellplaece, a healthcare procurement marketplace. Prior to that, Garrett was a Partner at Bee Partners, where he focused on marketplace and SaaS based climate tech investments. He served on the boards of Knowde, Super.com, Florence Healthcare, InnerPlant, Jitsu, and others, working alongside top tier Silicon Valley investors. An entrepreneur at heart, Garrett has worked in professional sports, real estate development, and technology. Garrett holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford and a MBA from the Foster School, at the University of Washington.

David acts as Virta’s go-to software and AI technical lead, bringing over 25 years in technology leadership across a diverse array of startups and companies, including ExactTarget (acquired by Salesforce for $2.5B) and Virta Health ($2B valuation). David worked with Dave Samuel and Josh Felser way back in 1997 to build Spinner (acquired by AOL for $320MM).

David is also Founding Advisor and CTO to Freestyle Capital and is currently an Expert in Residence at First Round Capital. David’s deep experience will come in handy during technical diligence and ongoing company support.

Ben leads Virta’s deeptech/hardware diligence efforts. Ben also leads due diligence for Standard Investments’ venture investments in the chemistry and materials science sectors and actively supports several portfolio companies and Standard Industries internal strategy, which he continues to support. Ben has diligenced thousands of deeptech/hardware companies over his career. He joined Standard in 2022 after holding leadership roles at HealthVerity, Optum Life Sciences, and Accenture, where he built and scaled analytics and strategy capabilities across the life sciences industry. Ben is a trained chemist, earning his PhD from Harvard University and his BS from UC Berkeley. NOTE: You won’t find Ben on LinkedIn, he’s that cool :)

Teddy supports Virta’s deeptech and hardware diligence efforts. He currently serves as Technical Program Director at Project Omega (a Virta portfolio company), following senior science and investing roles where he led deep technical diligence and thesis development across energy generation, storage, industrial transformation, and AI-enabled physical systems, with a strong emphasis on true technological differentiation and scalability.

Teddy holds a PhD and MS in Applied Physics from Caltech, where his research in fluid dynamics and electrohydrodynamics was supported by a NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship. He is a published scientist and inventor with multiple papers and patents in magnetic biosensing and microfluidic measurement systems, and began his research career at the University of Michigan. His background bridges rigorous scientific training with hands-on venture experience in science-driven, capital-intensive sectors.

Kyle supports Virta’s deeptech and hardware diligence efforts. Kyle is a senior applied scientist and engineer specializing in machine learning, robotics, and autonomous systems operating in the real world. Most recently, he served as Senior Principal Engineer at Epirus, where he led the ML architecture for an advanced counter-drone perception system and demonstrated real-time edge inference across 100+ Gbps of multimodal sensor data. Previously, Kyle spent nearly five years at Amazon, where he was a founding member of the Scout simulation team and later led Navigation, overseeing autonomy behavior, planning, and controls across the fleet.

Earlier in his career, Kyle worked in Boeing’s Flight Sciences organization on aeroelastic simulation, optimization, and uncertainty quantification. He holds a PhD and MS in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University and a BS in Mechanical Engineering from Yale University, and is a Kavli Fellow recognized for his contributions to applied science and engineering.

Farlan brings 20+ years of B2B SaaS sales leadership to the table, having guided multiple companies on the journey from $0 to $10M in ARR. Farlan previously worked with Russell at Full Harvest. Over the last few months, he has been working with Tyba, helping them refine their process and close key deals. Farlan has a Business and Information Systems degree from St. Francis Xavier University.

Over the past 18 years, Lee has co-founded and managed technology for companies as diverse as Time Warner, Razorfish Studios, and Terabolic, Inc. Most recently, Lee co-founded and served as CEO of Veri, a venture-backed NY mobile startup that in 2018 was acquired by The Knot. Lee has a BA in Computer Science from Brown.

Charlie founded and built Convex into the leading commercial contractor sales platform in the world. He has over 10 years of experience in building data, energy analytics and enterprise software. Charlie holds degrees from MIT, Harvard and Bowdoin and has been featured by The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Eyal brings +10 years of experience in startups (as a founder and senior executive), he has expertise in strategic partnerships, go-to-market (GTM) strategies, and product-led growth (PLG) methodologies, helping startups refine and execute growth initiatives aligned with their unique market opportunities. Eyal has worked closely with companies to develop scalable partnership programs (across channels, system integrators, ISVs, and more) and optimize PLG strategies to drive user acquisition and retention. Eyal is currently VP of Partnerships at Guidde and was previously Director of Global Strategic Alliances at Monday.com for over five years.