Jeremy Conrad

Jeremy Conrad studied mechanical engineering at MIT (B.S., roughly 2002–2006), where he worked on self-driving cars, drones, and satellites. Before his venture career he served four years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force, working on weapons-grade lasers and missile defense. This engineering-and-defense background shaped a career built around physical, hard-to-build technology rather than pure software.

In 2011 Conrad co-founded Lemnos (originally Lemnos Labs) with Helen Zelman Boniske, building one of the few venture firms dedicated to early-stage hardware. Operating out of an 8,000-square-foot former fish factory in San Francisco, Lemnos provided engineering, manufacturing, and capital support to pre-seed and seed hardware founders. The firm raised roughly $71.9M across three funds — including a $20M fund announced in 2014 and a $50M Fund III in March 2017 — and was an early backer of companies like Airware, Spire, and Swift Navigation. Conrad spent about seven years there, transitioning from general partner to venture partner as he moved toward operating.

In 2017 Conrad announced he was leaving full-time VC to "create an amazing robotics company." That became Quartz, a construction-technology startup he founded and led as CEO around 2019–2020. Quartz mounted camera-based systems on construction cranes to stream 4K video and deliver real-time job-site safety and monitoring data (priced around $2,000/month per crane). In May 2020 Quartz raised a $7.75M Series A led by Baseline Ventures, with Felicis Ventures, Lemnos, and Bloomberg Beta participating.

Most recently, Conrad founded and serves as CEO of PitPro Automation, a robotics company targeting the auto-repair market. PitPro has built an automated wheel changer — robots that torque and untorque lug nuts, remove and replace wheels, sense tread depth and tire pressure, and detect broken or stripped nuts — reportedly able to swap four wheels on a light-duty vehicle in under 15 minutes. Conrad frames the product as a way to prevent the repetitive muscle strains and injuries that drive technicians out of the trade, rather than to replace them. Throughout these operating roles he has remained an active angel investor.

• Invests at the earliest stages of building hardware — "Lemnos thrives in the earliest stages of building hardware, when every dollar counts, every hour matters, and each decision is crucial to success or failure."
• Backs both hardware startups and software companies whose technology runs on a hardware device — the hardware/software intersection is the core filter.
• Typical checks in the $200K–$2M range (about $500K sweet spot) at pre-seed and seed.
• Sector interests center on robotics, drones/aerial systems, space and satellites, sensors, and climate/deep tech — areas matching his MIT and Air Force engineering background.
• As an operator-turned-investor, he gravitates toward technically hard, capital-efficient hardware bets and founders who can navigate manufacturing and engineering risk, not just product-market fit.