It started in 2012 with Ravi Belani, then a venture capitalist at DFJ, hosting founder events in San Francisco. Enterprise founders kept telling him the same thing: they did not need millions of dollars to get started. They needed a small check and a program built for them, at a time when the best-known accelerators were designed for consumer apps. So he carved out a home for that group: Alchemist, an accelerator built only for enterprise founders and backed by DFJ, Khosla Ventures, US Venture Partners, Cisco and SAP.
Danielle D'Agostaro joined as co-founder in 2013. Together they brought in the best Partners in the industry to keep developing sales methodologies built specifically for the enterprise, work that became our playbooks and, later, published books. As that methodology evolved and we followed deeply technical founders through their journeys, it became clear their path was bigger than a six-month program. Enterprise sales cycles are long, and building a complex, deeply technical company takes years. So Alchemist grew into what it is today, better defined as an early-stage venture firm that stays with founders through all of it. Ian Bergman became CEO in 2026, with Ravi as chair.
“It's at the heart of community that true alchemy lies.”
Founder and Chairman, Alchemist
Along the way, we came to believe that extraordinary founders come from everywhere. So we built a community that reaches founders around the world, wherever they build.
Today we are a hand-selected team of the people you want by your side on your journey: Partners who have built billion-dollar businesses, operations experts who know what it takes to scale a company, 40,000 mentors across every industry, reaching most of the Fortune 500, and an investment team ready to guide your fundraising. And we are our founders: more than 750 portfolio companies from over 60 countries, building deeply technical companies across healthcare, quantum computing, defense, developer tools and wireless.
From the start, we chose one focus and set out to be the best at it. Everything we have built, from our Partners to our playbooks to our programs, is designed for deeply technical researchers, engineers and domain experts building the next generation of enterprise infrastructure and technology. Over a decade later, that focus has become our greatest strength.
