What does it take to be named a Top Fundraiser for two consecutive years? For Felicis, it meant building the operational intelligence layer necessary to capture the most transformative wave in tech history. In this exclusive interview, we sat down with Katie Riester, Managing Director and GP of Fund of Funds Investing, to discuss how Felicis translated 2025’s AI explosion into a disciplined, repeatable investment engine.
Being named a Top Fundraiser for the second year in a row suggests real conviction. What signals told you the timing was right in 2025?
Riester: Our fundraising timing is always driven by investment opportunity. In 2025, we saw an extraordinary pipeline. AI created the biggest wave in tech history. The sheer volume of deserving and impressive founders building the next-gen infrastructure, tools, and applications that will define how the world operates for decades to come, and they're moving fast. With so much transformative potential in front of us, raising fresh capital was both a strategic decision and an essential one. We couldn't sit on the sidelines when the next generation of generational companies is being built right now.
We also have had meaningful momentum in our portfolio: strong exits, mark-ups, and winning companies like Runway, Supabase, and Semgrep, achieving remarkable growth after we partnered with them. LPs believe in our thesis, so our conversations were less about convincing and more about access.
Investing in “the future” can sound broad on the surface. How does Felicis translate that mission into a disciplined, repeatable strategy that LPs can underwrite with confidence?
Riester: Our North Star is backing the world's best founders before success is obvious. We invest before success is guaranteed, when founders are just beginning to build but have a clear vision. This focus sharpens our discipline rather than diffuses it. For example, 93%+ of our investments are at the Seed and Series A stages. And we lead or co-lead 83% of our investments. We don’t wait for a signal from other investors. We back what we believe in, early and without hesitation.
Our decisioning standard is simple but rigorous: We ask, “Can this company become a generational platform leader?” If we believe in the founder’s vision, we do everything we can to support it. That consistency—same stages, same ownership targets, same founder-first ethos—is what gives LPs a repeatable model to underwrite, even as the specific sectors evolve with the market.
Beyond strategy and returns, LPs are paying closer attention to operating discipline and infrastructure. How has that shift shown up in fundraising conversations, and where does Felicis’s operating model stand out?
Riester: LPs today want to see the firm behind the fund, not just the thesis. In our conversations, they probe team quality, decision-making rigor, and how we are scaling our infrastructure. Felicis has invested heavily here: a consistent 35-person team across funds, clearly defined investment processes, and a move to Juniper Square for LP reporting that replaced fragmented, manual workflows with a centralized, audit-ready system. Quarterly reports that once took a full day to release now take hours. We've also stayed on the cutting edge with compliance and internal data flows. For example, the same infrastructure that keeps us audit-ready also powers how we evaluate first checks and follow-on decisions, ensuring our investment process is rigorous, consistent, and informed by the best available data at every stage. That kind of operational maturity signals to LPs that we run the fund the same way we expect our best portfolio companies to run their operations; that is, with accountability and precision.
Felicis has gone far beyond experimenting with AI; you’ve embedded it into investment workflows, institutional knowledge, and even the LP experience. How do you think about AI as an operating advantage rather than a tool, and what changes when LPs are invited into that intelligence layer instead of just receiving outputs?
Riester: AI has become core infrastructure at Felicis. Internally, AI accelerates how we source, diligence, and track companies across our portfolio. But the more consequential shift is that AI is becoming part of how we preserve and share institutional knowledge, so insight compounds across the firm rather than sitting in individual partners' heads.
The starting point was doing the unglamorous work early: cleaning and standardizing our data, building a research team, hiring data scientists, documenting workflows, and capturing the right data so AI could sit on top of a real institutional memory rather than a set of ad-hoc tools. Today, that means our system can synthesize billions of data points across email, Salesforce, public records, and enriched external data to power everything from sourcing to deal scoring to helping draft our investment memos. In other words, AI isn’t a “copilot” on the side of our business; it’s the infrastructure that lets us see more, move faster, and describe opportunities more clearly than we could manually.
Inviting LPs into that intelligence layer is the next logical step. Historically, LPs have only seen highly curated outputs: quarterly letters, decks, and a handful of anecdotes. When they can instead query the same institutional knowledge we rely on and understand the history behind a Canva or a Mercor, see how our thinking evolved round by round, or compare how we’ve underwritten similar patterns in the past, the relationship changes from one-way reporting to shared analysis.
When LPs are invited into that intelligence layer, it creates transparency into our process and builds a different kind of trust. It moves the LP relationship from passive capital allocation to genuine partnership in how we see the market.
You’ve leaned into a level of transparency around decision-making, portfolio data, and institutional knowledge that many firms still avoid. What are the trade-offs of that openness, and why has Felicis decided it’s worth it?
Riester: There's always a balance to strike, but we've found that openness creates far more value than it costs. Our LP base contains world-positive institutions, and they deserve clarity on how we think, not just what we've returned. When LPs have a genuine understanding of our portfolio, our decision-making frameworks, and where we're placing our conviction, they become far more than capital providers. hey open doors, flag relevant trends, make introductions, and engage with us strategically in ways that directly benefit our founders. That kind of informed partnership only happens when LPs have real context. It also attracts LPs who share our values, which makes for stronger, more aligned relationships over the life of the fund.
Culture is often discussed in the context of portfolio companies, but Felicis applies that same rigor to its LP base. How does your philosophy on values, transparency, and participation shape who gets access to the fund?
Riester: Since our first institutional raise in 2010, we have curated our LP base of world-positive organizations. These are institutions whose returns go toward causes like cancer research, social equity, and environmental protection. This is a core choice we made at Felicis: We want LPs who share our conviction that great returns and positive impact should coexist. That shared philosophy creates a foundation of trust that makes difficult conversations easier and long-term commitment more natural. We're selective because alignment on values is as important to us as capital capacity. And that selectivity resonates beyond the LP relationship—founders genuinely care about who is behind the capital they take. Knowing that Felicis's returns flow toward institutions advancing world-positive efforts motivates founders to choose us as a partner. It adds meaning to what they're building and reinforces that their success creates a broader positive impact in the world.
You just launched a major Felicis rebrand. Why make that effort now, and what role does brand play in building trust with LPs?
Riester: Most rebrands start from the wrong premise. You don't invent a new brand, you sharpen the truth about who you already are. That's exactly what this was for us. After years of backing founders, we had real clarity on what makes Felicis different, and it felt like the right moment to put that into the world.
At our core, we believe that founding a company is an act of bravery. The founders we back have the imagination, courage, and discipline to defy the odds and build something extraordinary. We wanted our brand to reflect the reverence we have for that. We are relentlessly founder-first, unabashedly optimistic, and we move with speed because time is a founder's most valuable asset. We believe early, we stay in it for the long haul, and we start from first principles rather than waiting for consensus. The rebrand didn't create any of that, but it did clarify it.
As for LPs, a brand does something important: it builds trust. When your identity is clear, and your actions match it year after year, it tells LPs that you know who you are and you don't drift. In a sea of VC-sameness, that kind of clarity is rare — and it's exactly what we wanted to put forward.
We’re proud to be your fund operations partner. How has Juniper Square helped you with the fundraising process?
Riester: Juniper Square transformed how we manage the LP experience from first close to ongoing reporting. During fundraising, the platform made it easy to track where each LP was in the subscription process, ensure documents were complete, and accelerate time to close—all in one system rather than across spreadsheets and disconnected portals. Post-close, quarterly reporting that once consumed a full day now takes a couple of hours. LPs moved from a confusing legacy interface to a clean, intuitive portal where they can access wire instructions, reports, and contacts on demand. It's been a meaningful step-change—not just operationally, but in how the platform reflects the quality and professionalism we want every LP to associate with Felicis.