Fusion Fund

Founder and Managing Partner Lu Zhang leads all investment decisions at Fusion Fund. She established the firm in 2015 and chairs the investment committee. Zhang's own background spans venture capital and startup operations, and she has publicly emphasized a technical diligence process that evaluates founding teams on their engineering depth and data infrastructure.

Fusion Fund sources through a network of university research labs, corporate R&D partnerships, and federal innovation programs like SBIR/STTR grants. The firm's investment team actively tracks technical talent emerging from Stanford, MIT, and Carnegie Mellon. Fusion Fund also co-invests alongside corporate venture arms to gain early visibility into enterprise-focused spinouts.

Fusion Fund is sector-focused within deep tech. The firm invests primarily in AI-driven software infrastructure, industrial and medical hardware, space technology, and enterprise SaaS. Its investment thesis requires that each portfolio company have a demonstrable technical moat — typically proprietary data, custom chip architectures, or novel computational models.

Fusion Fund typically leads or co-leads pre-seed and seed rounds. The firm writes first checks in the range of $1 million to $5 million. In later follow-on rounds, Fusion Fund may participate as a co-investor alongside larger institutional VCs, but its primary strategy is to secure meaningful ownership and board influence at the earliest stages.

Fusion Fund invests at pre-seed and seed stages almost exclusively. The firm occasionally participates in Series A rounds for existing portfolio companies through pro-rata or reserve allocations, but its core mandate is identifying technical teams before they have a commercial product or revenue.

Fusion Fund avoids consumer internet, marketplaces, and purely business-model-driven startups that lack a hardware or deep software IP layer. The firm does not invest in therapeutics or traditional biotech, focusing instead on medical devices and healthcare platforms that are enabled by AI, sensors, or imaging infrastructure.

Fusion Fund has not disclosed any separate growth-stage, credit, or philanthropic vehicles. The firm operates exclusively through its main venture capital fund series, currently deploying from its fourth flagship fund as of early 2025.