Pit Road Fund

Tom Mendoza serves as the General Partner and primary decision-maker. Mendoza built his career at NetApp, where he spent over twenty years, including a tenure as president, before transitioning to vice chairman. His investment decisions draw on a network of enterprise technology operators that also supply the fund's capital base.

The firm sources heavily through the University of Notre Dame ecosystem, where Mendoza is the namesake of the business college, and through the deep NetApp and enterprise IT executive diaspora. Because the fund's LPs are themselves current and former senior operators at major technology companies, they frequently surface founder teams emerging from inside large enterprise organizations — a channel that generalist seed funds rarely access.

Mendoza's public record shows no investment activity in consumer internet, hardware, biotechnology, or direct-to-consumer models. The fund's mandate, by observed behavior, is exclusively B2B enterprise technology. Sectors like medical devices, clean energy manufacturing, and media fall outside the stated thesis.

Tom Mendoza is a major benefactor and the namesake of Notre Dame's Mendoza College of Business. The fund's physical presence in Notre Dame, Indiana, creates a unique on-ramp for faculty-led spinouts and student-founded ventures, though the fund is not a university endowment vehicle and makes independent investment decisions.