VC Kanu Gulati turned a cold email into a job at Khosla Ventures. Here’s how she went from a Ph.D. to a partner investing in AI.

Khosla Ventures partner Kanu Gulati

When Kanu Gulati earned her Ph.D, she planned to spend her career working in a corporate laboratory, researching electronic design automation, also known as EDA.

Instead, she broke into the VC industry and is a partner at Khosla Ventures, where she writes checks backing AI companies. Founded by the prolific entrepreneur Vinod Khosla in 2004, the firm makes early-stage investments across a variety of industries, and it’s backed big names, including Okta, Affirm, Square, and OpenAI.

Advanced degrees aren’t a necessity for investors interested in artificial intelligence startups, and following the industry’s AI boom, there are plenty of VCs with different backgrounds — ranging from consumer to healthcare to other verticals — that are now making AI bets.

But graduate-level expertise can give investors a leg up when it comes to evaluating startups building complex generative AI tools, because they can more easily grasp the technology powering, say, a vector database or spatially intelligent robot.

For Gulati, completing Ph.D.-level research and working in a lab helped her develop a bevy of transferable skills for her eventual move to the VC world.

“In a Ph.D. program, there’s a lot of agency in terms of deciding what areas you want to go and pursue,” she told B-17. “Diving deep into a new area and identifying a new challenge you want to go after is a skill that naturally transfers well to VC.”

Gulati learned about the VC world when working at a large corporate laboratory.

With two parents who were doctors in the Indian military, Gulati grew up in multiple towns across India and changed schools every couple of years. One constant during that time period was a growing interest in science, inspired by Gulati’s older sister, who at the time was a college student studying engineering.

Gulati followed in her sister’s footsteps, attending Delhi Technological University for her undergraduate degree before moving to the U.S. to earn a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Texas A&M University.

She stayed in College Station to pursue a Ph.D., studying computer science innovation in the context of Moore’s Law – the idea that the number of transistors in a single graphics chip doubles every two years – and her work was funded by Nvidia and Intel.

While it would be years before she entered the VC world, Gulati said that the skills she developed during her Ph.D. program were critical to succeeding when she made a career change.

“Having the agency of doing what you think is exciting and novel and worth pursuing was exciting about a Ph.D.,” she said. “You might even know more than your professor when you spend 60-80 hours a week in a lab. Other than needing approval for committee members, you choose what you get to work on, and the bar is really high.”

After graduating, Gulati worked at Intel as a research scientist in its computer-aided design (CAD) lab and got her first exposure to the world of startups and venture capital. She started helping Intel Capital, the company’s VC investing arm, do due diligence for their startup investments. She liked the experience because, unlike her work as a research scientist, where she was focusing on one problem at a time, she could work towards solving multiple problems at once.

Getting to know founders was also a big draw, she said.

“I loved working with the founders, who had this amazing vision of what the world should look like,” Gulati said. “Their enthusiasm was infectious.”

In 2013, after three and a half years at Intel, Gulati departed to attend Harvard Business School, where she planned to get the business experience needed to make a career shift and join the VC world.

Between her first and second year, she sent a cold email to Vinod Khosla as well as the firm’s managing director, Sven Strohband. The move turned into a summer internship at the VC firm.

“Vinod Khosla’s chief of staff reached out, and I spent the summer working with startups that were speeding up AI applications on GPUs,” Gulati said. “Khosla doesn’t shy away from being very early in making bold, impactful investments, which is super exciting. He’s not jaded that he’s been in venture for 40 years — he’s excited for things to work, which is super inspiring.”

Gulati joined Khosla full time in 2017 and has been investing in AI startups ever since.

After graduating from Harvard Business School, Gulati wanted to gain operating experience at a startup. She cut her teeth as employee number two at Heavy AI, a startup that used GPUs to do data analysis and visualizations. A decade before the current AI revolution – she worked at the startup from 2014-2016 — Gulati said that the experience ignited a passion for AI innovation that is still a focal point of her career.

Gulati left Heavy in 2016 to work for a short time at Zetta Venture Partners, where she helped the firm raise its second fund.

In 2017, Khosla reached out again to her about returning to the firm full time. She accepted the offer and has been investing at the firm ever since. Her notable bets include writing checks for AI voice assistant builder PolyAI, which raised a $50 million Series C earlier this year; AI-powered task mining startup Mimica, which raised a $6 million Series A in 2021; and Korbit, which completes AI-powered code reviews and raised an $11.3 million Series A last year.

These days, AI is a broad class of startups, and Gulati says she’s focusing on a few key areas where tech can transform an entire industry. She’s excited about autonomous trucking and has backed a startup in the space called Waabi, which raised a $200 million Series B earlier this year and is planning to launch driverless tractor-trailers next year.

Gulati is also interested in how LLMs can improve computer programming and has backed Kognitos, which uses AI to automate back-end business processes. Additionally, she’s thinking about what’s next for AI models beyond LLMs, and wrote a check for Symbolica, a startup developing a new foundation model for AI reasoning.

“We’ve backed big things like OpenAI, which weren’t obvious from day one,” she said. “Because of Khosla’s brand and what we’ve gotten right, we attract bold founders who want like-minded investors who are involved in the long run.”