K9 Ventures

Manu Kumar is the Founder and Managing Partner and the sole investment decision-maker. He sources, conducts technical diligence, and negotiates terms without a partnership committee. His background combines computer science (Carnegie Mellon), a successful enterprise-software exit, and angel investing prior to launching K9.

K9 backs technical founders — often PhDs in computer science, engineering, or the hard sciences — who have built working software before raising capital. The firm's explicit lens favors code-centric defensibility and problem domains that require deep domain fluency, such as enterprise infrastructure, robotics, and computational biology.

K9 is a formal venture capital firm with multiple fund vintages, but its sole-GP structure makes it resemble a scaled solo angel. Manu Kumar is the only general partner, which means decisions are unilateral and fast, but the fund can conduct deeper technical diligence than a typical individual angel checkwriter.

K9 Ventures runs a direct-investment strategy and does not publicly participate as a fund-of-funds or allocate to other venture capital firms. Its capital is deployed exclusively into its own pre-seed and seed-stage portfolio companies.

K9 is heavily concentrated in Silicon Valley and the broader Bay Area, with select investments in other US technology hubs. The firm's sourcing relies on Manu Kumar's personal network inside Stanford's engineering ecosystem and the Bay Area technical-founder community, so non-Valley exposure is limited.

Deal flow comes primarily through Manu Kumar's network inside computer science and engineering departments — particularly Stanford and Carnegie Mellon — and through referrals from founders he previously backed. The firm does not operate a broad outbound sourcing platform and does not rely on demo-day or aggregator funnel programs.

There is no publicly disclosed philanthropic foundation or vehicle associated with K9 Ventures. The firm's structure is confined to its venture capital funds, with no adjacent family-office, foundation, or lending entity reported.