Darren Liccardo
Co-Founder & Managing Director
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- Full Name
- Darren Liccardo
- Title
- Co-Founder & Managing Director
- Firm
- Catapult Ventures
- Firm Type
- Venture Capital (early-stage / deep tech) — Liccardo also invests as an angel
- Investment Stage
- Pre-Seed and Seed
- Check Size
- ~$100K–$5M; sweet spot around $1.5M
- Target Company Profile
- "Scrappy and practical" deep-tech founders building at the intersection of hardware, embedded systems, and software
- Sector Focus
- AI, robotics, automation, IoT, autonomous systems, advanced sensors/photonics, aerospace
- Geographic Focus
- United States, primarily Silicon Valley / San Francisco Bay Area
- Location
- San Francisco Bay Area, California
Background
Darren Liccardo is Co-Founder and Managing Director of Catapult Ventures, an early-stage venture firm he launched with Rouz Jazayeri to back pre-seed and seed-stage startups at the intersection of hardware, embedded systems, and software. He has spent the majority of his career as an engineering executive in the aerospace and automotive industries, with a deep specialization in autonomous systems.
Before venture capital, Liccardo held a series of notable operating roles. He was the founding Director of Tesla's Autopilot engineering group, where he built the team and shipped Tesla's first Autopilot system. He later served as VP of Engineering at DJI, establishing the drone maker's Silicon Valley office focused on advanced R&D and business development in emerging industrial markets. Earlier, he led BMW's North American autonomous-driving research efforts at the BMW Technology Office and served as Director of Inertial Systems at Crossbow Technology.
Liccardo earned both his B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where his research focused on UAV sensing and control systems. He holds numerous patents in sensing, perception, and state estimation for robotic systems.
Alongside his firm, Liccardo has been an active angel investor and advisor to early-stage deep-tech and autonomy companies, drawing on his operating network across the automotive, aerospace, and robotics sectors.
Investment Thesis & Focus
- Invests at pre-seed and seed in deep-tech startups blending hardware, embedded systems, and software
- Core sectors: AI, robotics, automation, IoT, autonomous systems, advanced sensors, and photonics
- Check sizes roughly $100K–$5M, with a preferred (sweet-spot) size near $1.5M
- Backs "scrappy and practical deep-tech founders" who demonstrate grit and a willingness to execute — a thesis rooted in Liccardo's own operator background shipping real hardware/software systems (Tesla Autopilot, DJI)
- Values founders solving hard, capital-intensive technical problems rather than pure-software plays
Notable Investments
- Oculii — automotive/4D radar software; reportedly raised ~$55M (Series B) before being acquired by Ambarella (exit)
- Urban Sky — stratospheric/reusable weather balloon imaging; follow-on investment, ~$44M raised
- OpenLight — silicon photonics platform; participated in its Series A-1 (led by Matter Venture Partners)
- Polymath Robotics — autonomy software for industrial/off-road vehicles
- FlightWave Aerospace Systems — UAV/drone systems (exit)
- XNOR.ai — edge AI / on-device machine learning (acquired by Apple — exit)
- Left Hand Robotics — autonomous outdoor/snow-clearing robots (exit)
- Engine ML — machine-learning infrastructure (exit)
- Quadratic — computational/data platform; ~$13M raised
- Elastix — most recent first-time investment (2024–2025)
- Angel/advisor roles historically with autonomy companies including Swift Navigation, Baraja, DeepScale, PolySync, Auro Robotics, Starsky Robotics, and RightHook
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