Innovation Endeavors

Firm Profile

Early-stage venture firm founded 2010, headquartered in Palo Alto, CA. ⚠️ Get the founding story exact (Niam may see this page): the firm was co-founded by Dror Berman and Eric Schmidt, with Scott Brady and Rick Scanlon as founding partners. Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO/Executive Chairman) is the founder + principal backer/anchor — it is commonly described as “Eric Schmidt’s firm,” but the operating Managing Partner who runs the firm day-to-day is Dror Berman. Schmidt is a Founding Partner and the firm’s anchor capital, not the deal-running MP. ^[extracted — IE team page + Cooley + TechCrunch] (The CRM shorthand “Eric Schmidt’s firm” is correct in spirit; the partner who would actually run init’s deal is Harpi Singh, not Schmidt.)

• Thesis — “the Super Evolution”: invests at the intersection of three converging technical forces — (1) proliferating data/ubiquitous sensors, (2) advanced ML + cloud/compute, (3) advanced engineering (robotics/3D-printing/CRISPR/bio) — to drive “generational change” and “solve problems that matter.” The frame: a “collapse of time” that lets even small teams run experiments and improve the physical/biological world far faster. Not a generalist software/internet investor — they explicitly target science × technology. vcsheet · Worth interview w/ Harpi Singh
• Sectors: engineering, health/bio, climate, computing infrastructure, intelligent/vertical software, AI, the physical economy, robotics, food/ag, security. ^[extracted]
• Stage focus: seed and Series A, with the stated model of partnering “from inception through growth” and supporting through Series B; occasional pre-seed for exceptional founders. F4 · TechCrunch
• Check size: typical initial check ~$1M–$15M; frequently leads or co-leads and typically takes a board seat — explicitly aiming to be “the most active director.” ^[single-source — F4 firm profile; consistent with deal evidence (e.g. $6MConduitseedled,$5M Tetrix seed led)].
• Fund / vintage: Fund V — $630M, closed Jan 2024 (the firm’s largest fund to date), from 85 institutional LPs; intends to deploy into 30–35 companies. They raise the next fund before finishing the prior one to “keep investing seamlessly.” Cooley · TechCrunch (Prior vehicles IE III / IE IV still active — appear in 2026 SEC 13G filings, e.g. Eikon Therapeutics.)
• Structure: partnership (~23 staff per LinkedIn). Multistage in the sense of inception→growth, but runs a real seed/Series-A entry, not a late-stage-only fund. Eric Schmidt brings multiple parallel vehicles (Schmidt Sciences, Hillspire/family office, etc.) — those are separate from IE and not the fund init.inc would raise from. ^[inferred — keep IE distinct from Schmidt’s other entities]
• Distinctive programs: Curiosity Camp — an invite-only annual “unconference” in the Santa Cruz / Northern California mountains (no agenda, no cell service) gathering physicists, roboticists, computational biologists, rocket scientists; Camp 2025 was May 30–Jun 1 (annual, late May/early June). They also run a venture-creation / Research-Driven Ideation (RDI) program that incubates founding teams before the idea exists (Tetrix is a recent RDI company). Curiosity Camp
• Notable portfolio (logos): Uber, SoFi, Upstart, Planet, Formlabs, Kong, AlphaSense, Gatik, Atom Computing, Color, Eikon Therapeutics, Vicarious Surgical, Afresh, Homelight, Plenty, Zymergen (exited), Astra (exited), Slice (exited → Rakuten). LinkedIn

Partners

• Harpi Singh — General Partner (titled “Managing Partner” in the March 2026 Conduit announcement ^[ambiguous]). Our contact. Founder-operator (FiberTower, Slice → Rakuten), Stanford GSB lecturer, author of IE’s “System of Action” enterprise-AI thesis. AI / infra / data / security / vertical software. (deep dossier on his page)
• Dror Berman — Founding Partner / operating Managing Partner; runs the firm. Co-authors IE’s “agent economy” pieces with Eric Schmidt. Background described as special-forces. (plain text — not in roster)
• Eric Schmidt — Founding Partner / anchor backer; former Google CEO & Executive Chairman. (plain text — not in roster; distinct from “Joe Schmidt IV” at a16z who appears elsewhere in this wiki)
• Scott Brady — Founding Partner; co-founded both of Harpi’s companies with him (FiberTower, Slice) before reuniting at IE. (plain text)
• Rick Scanlon — Founding Partner. (plain text)
• Davis Treybig — General Partner (“company builder”; infra/AI). (plain text)
• Sam Smith-Eppsteiner — Partner. Nick Olsen — Partner. Jørgen Vig Knudstorp — Partner & Executive Advisor (former LEGO Group CEO). (plain text)

Recent pre-seed/seed activity (Pass-1 sketch — ≤5 deals; exhaustive 18–24mo pull is Pass 2)

Sketch only; source-tagged rows in /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/innovation-endeavors.csv.

• Conduit — $6M seed, led by Innovation Endeavors (w/ Y Combinator participation), Mar 2026. AI-powered warehouse / yard & dock management for logistics. Harpi Singh quoted (as “Managing Partner”); he’d met the founder “over two years ago.” ✅ Conduit LinkedIn
• Tetrix — $5M seed, led by Innovation Endeavors, ~2024–25. AI/LLM data-ingestion & analytics for private-market capital allocators; RDI-incubated by Harpi (founders Olivier Babin & Naunidh Singh Bhalla, ex-Stanford GSB). ✅ IE post · Silicon UK
• Jest — $7M seed, led by Innovation Endeavors (attributed to Harpi as the partner’s recent first-time investment). ⚠️ partial (amount single-source; details thin). F4
• Machina Labs — $16.3M Series A, led by Innovation Endeavors (Nov 2021). AI + robotics “software-defined factories” (roboforming). Cited by Berman as a recent lead. ✅ (older — context for the deep-tech thesis) [Machina/LinkedIn]
• Continual — $14.5M Series A, led by Innovation Endeavors (Jun 2022). AI-copilot platform; IE followed a seed that Amplify Partners led — see cross-check. ✅ [LinkedIn/Crunchbase]

(Other Harpi-led / IE deals for context: Panther (security data lake), Gatik ($4.5Mseedlead,autonomousmiddle-mile),\ast \ast Skylo,Viaduct,InsidePacket,Tromzo,TuneIn,RevSure,Optiml,TrunkTools\ast \ast .Olderhealthcare-AIseed:\ast \ast Viz.ai\ast \ast ($7.5M, 2017, IE co-led).)

Best data channels for this firm

• IE’s own innovationendeavors.com/insights + the partner’s “Our investment in X” posts are the single best source for thesis + partner attribution — they write detailed deal posts and the deal partner signs them (Harpi signs his — Tetrix, the AI-eng-tools series). Their Medium (medium.com/innovationendeavors) mirrors these.
• Founder LinkedIn announcement posts reliably name IE + the partner + co-investors (verified for Conduit → “Harpinder Singh, Managing Partner”).
• Trade press: TechCrunch (Berman gives fund-strategy interviews there; Harpi is also a TechCrunch author), SiliconANGLE, Silicon UK for amount/stage/date.
• SEC 13G/Form D: IE files 13Gs on public holdings (Eikon, Planet, etc.) by fund vehicle (IE III/IV/V) — good for confirming which fund holds what; Form D (US) confirms amount/date on US rounds. Many deep-tech/bio rounds are large & well-covered.
• Aggregators (vcsheet, F4, Tracxn, NFX Signal) good for roster + check-size ranges; NFX Signal is the best free partner-level lead-history source for Harpi. Codex understates “participated” rounds per playbook §5 — corroborate.

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

• Firm facts: Harpi Singh authored IE’s “System of Action” (SOA) thesis — “the next frontier of enterprise AI is autonomous decision making,” an abstraction layer that sits above and across fragmented systems-of-record to produce action and outcomes, not just data (“everyone’s building copilots; we’re building the commander”). His named SOA bets — Trunk Tools, RevSure, Optiml — are vertical-AI-takes-the-wheel companies. IE leads/co-leads and wants a board seat as “the most active director” with $1–15M initial checks. The Niam intro is live; Curiosity-Camp season is late May/early June.
• Conversation log (newest first, from CRM):
  • 2026-05-26 — Raise-open nudge sent to Harpi Singh on the cooling thread.
  • ~2026-05-18 to 5-24 — Follow-up (post-first-meeting). Surface-level “fine” but AMBIGUOUS: lots of questions, no substantive commitment, ended in a weird non-committal way. ^[ambiguous] (decode below).
  • 2026-05-07, 11:30 (Zoom) — first meeting with Harpi. Went well.
  • 2026-04-27 — Niam introduced Sazzad to Harpi Singh (GP, IE). Status: Follow Up Phase.
• Decoding the ambiguous follow-up (ranked hypotheses — discriminating signals, not a verdict):
  1. Diligence-mode interrogation, NOT a soft pass (highest probability). Harpi’s documented operating MO is Research-Driven Ideation — months of customer interviews, “fail-forward-fast,” and he explicitly says what got him to invest in Tetrix was a team that was “customer-centric… constantly experimenting, learning, and refining while asking the right questions.” Asking a lot of questions IS his method. A question-heavy, non-committal follow-up reads as him running his process, not declining. Discriminating signal: are the questions getting deeper/more specific (diligence) or staying generic/repeating (polite stall)?
  2. Stage/structure friction (real, worth probing). IE wants to lead/co-lead + take a board seat with a $1–15M check. If init’s round size, valuation, lead status, or board posture doesn’t match IE’s “most active director” model, you get exactly this polite hesitation. Discriminating signal: did the questions cluster on round construction / lead-vs-follow / board / ownership? If so → it’s a fit conversation.
  3. Newly-elevated title / needs internal consensus. He’s “GP” on the IE site but “Managing Partner” in the Mar-2026 Conduit release ^[ambiguous] — if he’s mid-elevation, early deals may need broader partner buy-in (→ more questions, slower yes).
  4. He’s writing-forward & methodical, not a fast-twitch closer. He’s an essay-publishing, RDI, “right point in time” investor (Berman: “more time to build relationships… when it’s the right point in time… we are there”). Slow ≠ no. A weird non-committal ending is consistent with a methodical pacer, not necessarily disinterest.
  5. Conflict-hold — UNLIKELY. No IE position found in any init.inc competitor’s cap table (see Cross-check). Do not assume a conflict.
• Mutual connections / warm path: Niam (intro 4/27; “friend of the company”). Secondary surface area: Stanford GSB (Harpi lectures there) and the IE founder community.
• Personal & rapport notes (firm-level): IE culture is curiosity-first, deep-tech, “ask big questions,” ecosystem-building (Curiosity Camp, RDI). They prize founders with a non-obvious “connect-the-dots” insight using data × compute × engineering and a methodical customer-discovery process. Their published frames are Super Evolution and System of Action.
• Live stage: tracked in the CRM (Google Sheet) — not duplicated here. (Current: Follow Up Phase.)

Cross-check vs existing wiki

• No prior mention of Innovation Endeavors, Dror Berman, or Eric Schmidt-the-IE-founder anywhere in the vault before this page (grep clean across entities/, synthesis/, references/). The only “Schmidt” hits are Joe Schmidt IV at a16z (who led Treeline’s Series A) — a different person; do not conflate Eric Schmidt (IE) with Joe Schmidt IV (a16z).
• No competitor cap-table conflict found. Explicit scan of init.inc’s competitor set (Treeline, Avoca, Serval, Edra, Mercor, Atomicwork, Aisera, Moveworks) shows no Innovation Endeavors position. IE’s adjacent-AI portfolio (Gatik=logistics AV, Conduit=warehouse ops, Panther=security, Continual=AI copilot) does not include a direct AI-MSP / ITSM competitor. No conflict-hold. ✅
• One real edge to the wiki: Amplify Partners ↔ Innovation Endeavors on Continual. The amplify-partners.csv already notes “Continual… Series A later led by Innovation Endeavors.” Confirmed: Amplify led Continual’s $4Mseed(Dec2021);\ast \ast IEledthe$14.5M Series A** (Jun 2022). Agreement, no contradiction — this page adds the IE-led-A attribution. It’s a useful pattern signal: IE follows AI/dev-tools companies into Series A (Continual, and System Initiative-adjacent infra) — i.e. they’ll meet a strong seed-stage AI-infra company and lead the A.

Related

Harpi Singh · Niam (connector — intro 4/27) · Amplify Partners (co-investor on Continual: Amplify seed → IE Series A) · Init Intelligence (the raise)

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-25)

Exhaustive ~18-24mo pull (Nov 2024 → May 2026). Full source-tagged data: /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/innovation-endeavors.csv (21 rows; net-new vs Pass-1 = 16). Triangulated against IE’s own Insights “Meet X” posts, primary press (TechCrunch / BusinessWire / PR Newswire / SiliconANGLE), founder/firm LinkedIn, PitchBook/CBInsights/Tracxn spine, and SEC EDGAR Form D.

• In-window SEED count = 9 (Nov 2024 → May 2026), plus 2 pre-window edges (Tetrix Sep-2024, ElectronX Jun-2024) kept for context.
  • LED: Bauplan ($7.5M,Ap{r}^{\prime }25),Intuigence($10M, Jul’25), Mesa ($5M,No{v}^{\prime }25),Jest($7M, Feb’26), Conduit ($6M, Mar’26) — 5 led.
  • PARTICIPATED: Inception ($50M,No{v}^{\prime }25),LightTable($6M, Sep’25), Optiml (€8M/$8.6M, Feb’26) — 3 participated.
  • Edge: ElectronX in-window = participated-only follow-ons (the original $15M seed it LED was Jun-2024, pre-window).
• Seed lead-rate ≈ 5 of 8 in-window seeds led/co-led (~63%). IE genuinely leads — consistent with the firm’s stated “leads or co-leads, takes a board seat, aims to be the most active director” posture. Their participations cluster on either very-large AI-infra seeds they can’t solo-anchor (Inception $50M) or non-US/specialist-led rounds (Optiml €8M, LightTable).
• Check/stage: LED seeds cluster $5M–$10M (Bauplan $7.5M,Intuigence$10M, Mesa $5M,Jest$7M, Conduit $6M,Tetrix$5M). This is the core seed band — squarely inside the F4-stated $1M–$15M check. They write much bigger on later rounds (led Capsule’s $12MA;co-ledThinkBioscienc{e}^{\prime }s$55M A) and follow on through B/C (Trunk Tools B $40M,DatarailsC$70M).
• Cadence: ~1 new seed announced every 6–8 weeks across the window; bursty around Insights-post drops (Nov 2025 saw both Mesa and Inception). Pace looks healthy for a ~$630M Fund V deploying into 30–35 companies.
• Sector mix: strongly vertical-AI / applied-AI for the physical & professional economy — construction (LightTable, Trunk Tools), logistics/warehouse (Conduit), process/chemical manufacturing (Intuigence), real-estate finance (Optiml), private-markets investing (Tetrix), energy markets (ElectronX) — plus AI dev-infra (Bauplan, Mesa, Inception/dLLMs) and bio/genomic medicine (Think Bioscience, Averna). This maps exactly onto the “Super Evolution” + “System of Action” theses; consumer is absent.
• Partner attribution (clear from IE’s signed Insights posts): Davis Treybig (promoted to GP Oct-2025) owns the AI dev-infra / codegen lane — Bauplan, Mesa, Inception, Extend all carry his “Meet X” posts. Harpi Singh owns vertical “System of Action” AI — Tetrix (RDI-incubated), Conduit, plus follow-on SOA bets Trunk Tools / Optiml / RevSure. Harpi’s lane is vertical SOA AI owning a workflow.
• Notable seeds: Conduit (the live Harpi in-window seed, 6M Mar'26), Mesa & Bauplan (Treybig's dev-infra leads), Intuigence (10M — IE’s largest in-window led seed). Inception ($50M, IE participated) is the marquee logo but a follow, not a lead.
• ⚠️ Data conflicts / disambiguation resolved:
  • Jest — disambiguated to jest.com (messaging/games app platform), NOT the Jest testing framework; Pass-1 ⚠️ upgraded to ✅ ($7M seed, IE led, Feb 2026).
  • Inception stage is ambiguous (most press = seed; some = Series A) — recorded as a seed-class participation. ^[ambiguous]
  • General Intuition ($133.7M gaming seed) is a PitchBook false-positive — no primary source names IE; excluded. ❌
  • Cosmon (AI for mechanical engineers) is listed under IE’s PitchBook portfolio but no primary press confirms IE in any round — flagged ❓ COULDN’T-CONFIRM, not counted.
  • Extend ($17M, IE led, Jun’25) was reported as a combined seed + Series A (playbook combined-round pitfall) — captured via the Extend/Treybig post; treated as an A-leaning combined round (not double-counted as a clean seed).
• Best data channels for THIS firm (confirmed in Pass 2): (1) IE’s own innovationendeavors.com/insights “Meet X / Our Investment in X” posts — the single best source; the deal partner signs them, giving clean per-deal partner attribution (Treybig vs Harpi) plus thesis. (2) Primary press (TechCrunch, BusinessWire, PR Newswire, SiliconANGLE) for amount/stage/date — reliable and usually multi-sourced. (3) Founder/firm LinkedIn for role + co-investors. (4) PitchBook/CBInsights/Tracxn as a spine to surface candidate names — but verify: PitchBook over-attributed General Intuition and Cosmon to IE (false-positives). (5) SEC Form D corroborates US issuers (Bauplan confirmed) but most IE rounds are already well-covered by press. Aggregators that drop “participated” rounds (per playbook §5) missed Inception/LightTable/Optiml as IE deals — recovered via the Insights posts.