Anna Patterson

Anna Patterson, founder and managing partner of Gradient Ventures

Anna Patterson, founder and managing partner of Gradient Ventures, Google's venture fund for early-stage AI startups. She holds a Computer Science Ph.D. from the University of Illinois.

▶ She has been:

- the recipient of the Technical Leadership ABIE Award in 2016.
- an AI research scientist at Stanford University.
- the co-founder of Xift and Cuil (clustering-based search engines) and Recall (the first history-based search engine), all three later acquired by Google.
- the board member of Streamlit (later acquired by Snowflake), an open-source Python app framework.

She also serves as the VP of engineering in AI at Google, overseeing the integration of AI into the company's various products, such as:

- helped Android scale from 3 million to over a billion phones.
- managed the Google Play's launch and operations.
- architected TeraGoogle, the search serving system that increased the index size over 10X at its launch.

▶ Since 2017, Gradient Ventures has invested in 186 companies, including firms like Lambda, Mural, Openly, Secureframe, Flatfile, Labelbox and more.

Bottom line: I really admire Anna's work because, besides being a strategic investor, she prioritizes investing in startups that comply with AI ethical and privacy values. For instance, she declined to invest in an AI camera firm that uses facial recognition in their data.