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Corinne Riley

Corinne works with early-stage founders who are creating data and AI products at the infrastructure and application layers.

Corinne Riley
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My favorite part of working with early-stage B2B companies is finding the first customers. I’m continuously engaging with buyers so that I can help match new founders to their design partners.

Early entrant

I love engaging with founders at the pre-idea stage, helping them validate their hypothesis and decide if their vision for a company is viable. To do that, I spend a lot of time with their would-be customers. I am constantly talking to different buyers at various enterprise companies asking what they are looking for, what they’ve evaluated, and what their pain points are. That puts me in a position to help founders think about who their first customers could be and what an MVP might look like to achieve those key early wins. Once they have those first customers, I work with founders on expanding that circle and making the process repeatable.

Recently, I’ve been working with a number of our enterprise-focused AI companies on how to approach customers by helping them answer a series of questions: how scoped down should the trial be? What does this customer care about? How long should it take to prove value? These aren’t obvious answers for most early companies, and the answer changes from customer to customer. The time I spend with prospective customers helps me design approaches that foster long-term customer relationships and healthy growth.

Enterprising investor

I love the impact and scale of investing in B2B businesses. I’m drawn to the fact that end users often face clear and immediate pain points, yet the solutions aren’t always obvious or available. Creating software that transforms the way organizations operate requires a founder who possesses a unique blend of empathy and strong conviction. Striking the delicate balance between attentively listening to customers and pursuing their own vision, to push for further insights, or to transition to the next product or larger customer are all challenges I hope to assist with. I aim to work with talented founders as a thought partner and sounding board to help answer these questions and more.

Growing the network

One of the things that drew me to Greylock is the opportunity to build new initiatives that expand the firm’s impact. In early 2022, I launched our Scout program, through which we invite top angel investors to form a special relationship with Greylock. It’s a win-win that expands our reach and offers scouts the resources – both financial and tribal knowledge – to further their investments in the startup ecosystem. Scouts join us in cohorts that help build community, and bring us domain expertise and operational excellence. In 18 months, the program has grown to include 35 Scouts across three cohorts, investing in over 100 early startups —and we’re just getting started.

I also built Greylock’s Edge program. It’s a company-building program where we seek out promising founders and ideas at the earliest stages, and work with them to get those ideas off the ground. Historically, Greylock has had lots of success helping founders initiate companies. For example, Workday and Palo Alto Networks both started in our offices, and more recent examples include Abnormal Security and Tome. This program is a way to operationalize the lessons of those successes into a repeatable program. We do it without taking any equity up front. It’s a higher integrity way of working with founders to help shape their ideas from the ground up.

Portfolio Companies

Adept Logo Grey

Useful general intelligence.

Domain

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

San Francisco, CA

link
Axiamatic Logo

AI for ERP Modernization

Domain

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Series A

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Asheem Chandna, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

Saratoga, CA

link
Baseten Logo

Baseten is an ML Application Builder that simplifies the set-up of backends, frontends, and MLOps—so your models get used faster.

Domain

AI, Infrastructure

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

Remote-first

link
Braintrust Logo Grey

Enterprise-grade stack for building AI products

Domain

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

San Francisco, CA

link
common room logo

People matter most.

Domain

SaaS

FIRST PARTNERED

Series B

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

Seattle, WA | USA

link
opal logo

Data-centric identity security platform.

Domain

Cybersecurity

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

New York, NY

link
ResolveAI Logo

AI Production Engineer

Domain

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

San Francisco, CA

link
WarpStream Logo

Cloud native data streaming infrastructure

Domain

Infrastructure

FIRST PARTNERED

Series A

CURRENT STATUS

Acquired

INVESTORS

Jerry Chen, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

HQ

Remote

link
Adept Logo Grey

Useful general intelligence.

Adept is an ML research and product lab building useful general intelligence in the form of a universal AI teammate. It was founded by a team with deep roots in ML, including key contributors to Google, DeepMind, and OpenAI’s largest models. Adept envisions a world where people and computers work together creatively to solve problems.

DOMAIN

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

David Luan, Co-founder

HQ

San Francisco, CA

Axiamatic Logo

AI for ERP Modernization

Axiamatic AI leverages an agentic platform, process-specific models, and proprietary knowledge bases to save organizations 25%+ in cost and schedule and 100,000+ hours of key stakeholder time in their ERP modernization initiatives.

DOMAIN

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Series A

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Asheem Chandna, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

Rajiv Gupta - CEO and Co-Founder

Kaushik Narayan - CTO and Co-Founder

HQ

Saratoga, CA

Baseten Logo

Baseten is an ML Application Builder that simplifies the set-up of backends, frontends, and MLOps—so your models get used faster.

Baseten makes going from machine learning models to production-grade applications fast and easy. With Baseten, data science and machine learning teams can ship full-stack ML applications without backend, frontend or MLOps knowledge, enabling faster, smarter decision-making at their organizations.

DOMAIN

AI, Infrastructure

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

● Tuhin Srivastava, Co-founder and CEO

● Amir Haghighat, Co-founder and CTO

● Philip Howes, Co-founder and Chief Scientist

HQ

Remote-first

Braintrust Logo Grey

Enterprise-grade stack for building AI products

Braintrust is like an operating system for engineers who are building AI software. Developers use Braintrust to evaluate how changes to their code impact end users before they ship, and then incorporate real-world examples back into their evaluations to keep making improvements.

DOMAIN

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

Ankur Goyal, Founder and CEO

Manu Goyal, Founding Engineer

HQ

San Francisco, CA

common room logo

People matter most.

Common Room makes it easy to deepen relationships across your community, anywhere people are.

DOMAIN

SaaS

FIRST PARTNERED

Series B

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

Linda Lian, Co-Founder & CEO

Francis Luu, Co-Founder & Head of Product Design

Viraj Mody, Co-Founder & Head of Engineering

Tom Kleinpeter, Co-Founder & Chief Architect

HQ

Seattle, WA | USA

opal logo

Data-centric identity security platform.

Opal is the leading modern identity security platform. We provide the automation and orchestration workflows necessary to leverage identity and implement least privilege at scale. The world’s best companies from Fortune 500 to forward thinking startups trust Opal to govern, adapt, and remediate risky access at scale.

DOMAIN

Cybersecurity

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

Umaimah Khan, CEO & Co-Founder

HQ

New York, NY

ResolveAI Logo

AI Production Engineer

AI Production Engineer that is on-call and resolves alerts and incidents.

DOMAIN

AI

FIRST PARTNERED

Seed

CURRENT STATUS

Active

INVESTORS

Saam Motamedi, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

Spiros Xanthos, Founder & CEO

Mayank Agarwal, Founder & CTO

HQ

San Francisco, CA

WarpStream Logo

Cloud native data streaming infrastructure

WarpStream provides a drop-in replacement for Apache Kafka that runs directly on top of object storage, with no local disks.

DOMAIN

Infrastructure

FIRST PARTNERED

Series A

CURRENT STATUS

Acquired

INVESTORS

Jerry Chen, Corinne Riley

LEADERSHIP

Richard Artoul, CEO and Co-Founder

Ryan Worl, CTO and Co-Founder

HQ

Remote

Insights

Code Smarter, Not Harder
Greymatter // Corinne Riley

Code Smarter, Not Harder

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WarpStream Logo
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Streaming Data for Everyone

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Braintrust Logo Grey
post image

Infrastructure for AI’s New Era

link
post image

Greylock’s First Researcher In Residence

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Mapping the Cloud Ecosystem

Mapping the Cloud Ecosystem

link
Funding the Cloud Challengers

Funding The Cloud Challengers

link
BNPL for Businesses
Greymatter // Corinne Riley

BNPL for Businesses

link
Community-Led Growth
Greymatter // Corinne Riley

Community-Led Growth

link

In the News

Business Insider // 09.09.24

44 of the most promising AI startups of 2024

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Business Insider // 08.07.24

85 of the most promising startups of 2024

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