New Catalyst

John Bicket is the sole disclosed principal and decision-maker. He co-founded Meraki, the enterprise networking company Cisco acquired for $1.2 billion in 2012, and now deploys his personal capital through New Catalyst without a reported investment committee structure.

The firm relies on a technical-sourcing network centered on Meraki alumni, Stanford engineering graduates, and practitioners in climate infrastructure. Because Bicket evaluates companies from an operator's perspective — often conducting technical due diligence personally — the firm competes on domain fluency rather than brand visibility.

New Catalyst operates as a single-family office deploying the Bicket family's capital. It does not raise institutional or third-party LP capital and does not market itself to external allocators, placing it firmly in the permanent-capital family-office category rather than a traditional venture firm.

The firm invests exclusively through direct deals — equity and SAFE instruments at pre-seed and seed stages. There is no public record of fund-of-funds commitments or LP positions in third-party venture funds.

The capital originates from Cisco's 2012 acquisition of Meraki, a cloud-managed networking company that John Bicket co-founded and helped build into a market leader in enterprise WiFi and SD-WAN. The all-cash transaction was valued at $1.2 billion.

New Catalyst does not invest in consumer internet, social media, pure-play SaaS, or financial technology. Bicket's observable deal history and technical background indicate a narrow focus on physical-world infrastructure problems — energy, water, climate adaptation, and industrial AI — where software serves as an enabler rather than the product.

The firm co-invests selectively with a tight circle of technical peers — including Meraki co-founders and California-based deep-tech operator-angel networks — but does not solicit or accommodate institutional co-investors. Co-investment relationships are personal, not programmatic.