Tramway Venture Partners

Martin P. Serna and David Salazar founded the firm in 2017 to close the capital gap for early-stage technology companies spinning out of New Mexico's national laboratories and research universities. Both partners brought operational and investment experience within the state's technology ecosystem. The founding thesis held that the Mountain West produced disproportionately strong intellectual property but received disproportionately little venture attention, creating an arbitrage opportunity for a locally embedded seed fund.

Tramway focuses on pre-seed and seed-stage investments. As an early-stage vehicle, it positions itself as the first or among the first institutional checks into a company. Precise check-size ranges have not been publicly disclosed by the firm, but the partnership's stated model is to lead or co-lead rounds for startups transitioning from lab or grant-based funding to commercial venture backing.

The firm's sourcing model is built on physical proximity to three core innovation engines in New Mexico: Sandia National Laboratories, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and the University of New Mexico. Tramway cultivates relationships with principal investigators, technology-transfer officers, and grant-funded founder teams within this network. This gives the partnership early visibility into federally funded R&D that is approaching commercial readiness, often before those opportunities reach broader venture-market distribution channels.

While the firm's core sourcing network is concentrated in New Mexico and the broader Mountain West, Tramway's stated geographic mandate is not exclusively limited to the state. However, the partnership's structural advantage and the bulk of its pipeline are understood to derive from the lab and university cluster in its home region. The firm's name itself — a reference to the historic Albuquerque tramway — signals an identity tied specifically to that geography.

Tramway targets deep-technology sectors that align with the research strengths of the Sandia, Los Alamos, and University of New Mexico ecosystems. Confirmed areas of focus per the firm's communications include enterprise software, artificial intelligence and machine learning, cybersecurity, digital health, and energy transition technologies. The portfolio tilts toward companies with defensible intellectual property, often with dual-use potential across commercial and government applications.

Tramway Venture Partners operates as a traditional venture capital firm with a managing-partner-led investment committee. It is structured as an external manager raising committed capital from limited partners to deploy across a portfolio of early-stage companies. The firm does not appear to have publicly disclosed the size of its fund or funds, nor the composition of its limited-partner base.

The firm markets its proximity to Sandia and Los Alamos as a core sourcing differentiator, but there is no public evidence of a formal, exclusive technology-transfer agreement or embedded partnership structure with either laboratory. The relationship appears to operate as a conventional venture-sourcing and educational advisory network, where the partners' local embeddedness and domain fluency give them an advantage in evaluating and accessing lab-linked opportunities without a contractual pipeline right.