Peter Sonsini

Pete Sonsini is a venture capitalist and technologist who spent nearly two decades as a General Partner at New Enterprise Associates (NEA) before co-founding his own seed-stage firm, Laude Ventures. He joined NEA in 2005 and became co-head of the firm's enterprise software practice, focusing on early-stage enterprise software, systems, and infrastructure companies and serving on numerous portfolio boards. He was named a General Partner at NEA in 2011 (alongside Tony Florence).

Before venture capital, Sonsini was part of VMware's early team, serving as Senior Director of Strategic Alliances where he struck the company's initial OEM partnerships and grew OEM-driven annual sales from $0 to roughly $40 million in four years. He also spent time in sales at HP earlier in his career. He earned a BA in Political Economy from the University of California, Berkeley, and an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. His Berkeley ties remain central to his investing identity and to Laude's sourcing strategy.

In 2023, Sonsini left NEA amid a leadership transition at the firm and set out to raise his own vehicle. In December 2024 he launched Laude Ventures, a $150 million seed fund, together with Andy Konwinski (co-founder of Databricks and Perplexity) and Andrew Krioukov (co-founder of Antimatter). All three are UC Berkeley alumni, and the fund is built around the thesis that "research technologists make the best founders." Laude's limited partners include more than 50 leading computer scientists — among them Dave Patterson, Jeff Dean, Ion Stoica, Ali Ghodsi, and Aravind Srinivas — and the firm notes that roughly one in three of these researcher-LPs has founded a unicorn.

Sonsini's track record has repeatedly landed him on the Forbes Midas List, driven by generational enterprise/AI outcomes including Databricks and Perplexity.

• Invests early — "at the moment of discovery" — backing deeply technical founders and helping them turn research breakthroughs into breakout companies.
• Core belief: "research technologists make the best founders" — Laude explicitly favors discovery-driven innovation over pure "disruption."
• Strong bias toward research/academic spinouts, especially from UC Berkeley, leveraging a network of 50+ computer-scientist LPs as a sourcing and diligence advantage.
• Sector focus on enterprise software, AI/ML and data infrastructure, developer tools, systems, and security — a continuation of the enterprise-infrastructure lane he ran at NEA.
• Fund I is $150M targeting ~25 companies, implying meaningful seed ownership and concentrated, hands-on board involvement (he historically takes board seats).