Brooke Seawell

A. Brooke Seawell has spent roughly 50 years as an operating executive, financial leader, and venture investor in technology. He joined New Enterprise Associates (NEA) as a Venture Partner in 2005, where he focuses on software, systems, and internet investments. Before NEA, he was a Partner at Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) from 2000 to 2004.

Prior to his venture career, Seawell built a ~25-year track record as an operating executive and CFO. He was Executive Vice President of NetDynamics (acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1998); Senior Vice President of Finance and Operations and CFO of Synopsys from 1991 to 1997, which he took public in 1992; and Vice President of Finance and Production and CFO of Weitek, a fabless semiconductor company, from 1983 to 1991, which he took public in 1988. Across his career as a founder, officer, investor, or director he has been directly involved in 12 IPOs — including NVIDIA, Synopsys, Tableau Software, and Tenable — and roughly 13–14 strategic acquisitions.

Seawell is best known as a long-serving public-company board member and audit-committee specialist. He has been a director of NVIDIA since 1997 and chairs its audit committee; he also serves on the boards and as audit chair of Tenable and GoodLeap, and has been audit chair for eight public companies. In 2024 the National Association of Corporate Directors named him one of the Top 100 corporate directors in the U.S. In late October 2025, when NVIDIA reached a record ~$5 trillion market cap, Forbes reported that Seawell — a roughly 0.02% shareholder — had become the company's sixth billionaire, with an estimated fortune around $1.1 billion.

Seawell holds a BA in Economics and an MBA in Finance, both from Stanford University, and served three years in the U.S. Navy earlier in his life. He resides in Atherton, California.

• Invests as an NEA Venture Partner in software, systems, and internet companies, leaning on decades of operating and CFO experience rather than a pure-financial lens.
• Comfortable across stages given NEA's multi-stage model; reported check range ~$2M–$50M with a ~$25M sweet spot (aggregator data — treat as approximate).
• Deep specialization in financial discipline, governance, and scaling to IPO — his repeated role as audit-committee chair signals he adds most value helping companies mature their finance/operations function toward a public exit.
• Recent activity shows appetite for AI and deep-tech infrastructure (e.g., his 2025 involvement with CuspAI), consistent with a semiconductor and systems heritage stretching back to Weitek and NVIDIA.