Cagla is a partner at Category Ventures, a pre-seed and seed firm based in San Francisco. She focuses on AI and data infrastructure, robotics, developer tools, and enterprise apps. The majority of the teams she currently works with have at least one co-founder with a PhD.

Prior to investing, Cagla was an engineer and product leader at Microsoft. She holds a BS in Math and Computational Science and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, as well as an MBA from HBS. While at Stanford, Cagla was a teaching assistant for “CS145: Introduction to Databases” and she still has a soft spot for founders working in data systems. 

Tim is a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, where he is part of the Data Systems Group in CSAIL, and a former Director of Applied Science at Amazon Web Services (AWS). He co-direct MIT’s Generative AI Impact Consortium (MGAIC), the Data Systems and AI Lab (DSAIL@CSAIL), and the new Everest@CSAIL initiative. He also co-founded Instancio and Einblick Analytics, both of which were acquired.

Before joining MIT, he was an Assistant Professor at Brown University, and spent time at Google Brain. He is a Sloan Research Fellow and has received several awards, including the VLDB Early Career Research Contribution Award, the Intel Outstanding Researcher Award, the VMware Systems Research Award, Brown University’s Early Career Research Achievement Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and multiple best paper and demo awards at VLDB, SIGMOD, and ICDE.

Ajay joined Osage University Partners in 2021 as an Associate on the technology investment team. He focuses on investment opportunities across software, development, and hardware. Prior to OUP, Ajay was Chief of Staff and Product Manager at Kubisys, an enterprise software startup that raised over $15M. At Kubisys, he led fundraising and business development efforts while launching mission-critical products.

Ajay holds an M.S. in Engineering & Management from MIT, where he was an Integrated Design & Management Fellow. His graduate research focused on engineering, business, and design, including developing an algorithm to predict student dropout risk due to mental illness. He also holds a B.Sc. from Babson College.

Fatma Ozcan is a Principal Engineer at Systems Research@Google. Before she came to Google, she was a Distinguished Research Staff Member and a senior manager at IBM Almaden Research Center. Her current research focuses on platforms and infra-structure for large-scale data analysis, query processing and optimization of semi-structured data, and democratizing analytics via NLQ and conversational interfaces to data.

Dr. Ozcan got her PhD degree in computer science from University of Maryland, College Park, and her BSc degree in computer engineering from METU, Ankara. She has over 21 years of experience in industrial research, and has delivered core technologies into IBM products. She has been a contributor to various SQL standards, including SQL/XML, SQL/JSON and SQL/PTF.

Rana works at the intersection of systems, machine learning, and algorithms, designing and building efficient, scalable AI systems. Recently, her work has focused on optimizing large language model (LLM) inference.

She is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard University, working with Michael Mitzenmacher and Minlan Yu. She received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Technion, where she was advised by Roy Friedman. Before that, she worked at Mellanox (now NVIDIA) as a Senior Software Engineer. She also received my B.Sc. and M.Sc. from the Technion.