Our Ethos
We are low volume, high conviction, early-stage investors.
We invest in a small number of companies each year and go deep. Every founder gets direct access to our full team with decades of experience building and scaling companies from 0 to hundreds of millions of revenue.
We help you win with your product, customers, and market.
The best founders want revenue and hires, not generic startup stories. We open up our networks to support our founders with early customers, first hires, investor introductions, tactical advice, and more.
The market you pick matters.
We take a thematic market and customer driven approach to identify areas we’re excited by and we seek to partner with strongly opinionated founders building in those markets. → See our request for startups
Opinionated capital for opinionated founders.
We spend years developing deep conviction in the markets we care about — so we can move fast, go deep, and bring more than capital to the table.
Portfolio
Safety & Security of the Physical and Digital World
Accelerated Computing
Health
Wealth
GTM
Physical World
Regulated Enterprise Modernization
* Pre-formation investment
“Pathlight was critical in helping us expand our vision and ambition of what Apollo’s product could become and how it can serve customers. Their connectivity across the founder + investor ecosystem has been a game changer for Apollo.”
“The number of initial design customers that Pathlight intro’d to us has been incredible! Charley and Mahdi were one of the most prepared investors heading into our pitch meeting and they quickly understood the value of what we were building while we were in YC. All investors promise to be helpful, but Pathlight is one of the few that follow through and it’s been amazing partnering with them post demo-day.”
Request for Startups
We publish detailed investment theses including the specific business models, markets, and founder profiles we want to fund. If you’re building in any of these areas, we want to hear from you.
2026 Theses
AI-Native Systems Integrators
The next wave of consulting and services firms will be built on AI from day one, delivering enterprise transformation at a fraction of legacy cost.
Rebuilding the Modern Healthcare Stack
Revenue cycle, clinical operations, and payer infrastructure are ripe for software-native replacements that reduce cost and improve outcomes.
Capital Markets Infrastructure
Trading, clearing, compliance, and data infrastructure serving institutional finance — where reliability and trust are non-negotiable.
Digitizing the Financial Plumbing of the Physical World
Payments, invoicing, and treasury workflows for industries that still run on paper, phone calls, and manual reconciliation.
Vertical Hardware & Applied Robotics
Purpose-built hardware and robotics for specific industrial workflows where general-purpose solutions fall short.
Next-Generation Energy, Utilities, and the Built World
Software and infrastructure enabling the energy transition, grid modernization, and smarter management of physical assets.
Security Across Physical, Cyber, and Critical Infrastructure
Protecting systems, networks, and physical spaces as threat surfaces expand and converge across digital and physical domains.
Digitizing the Machinery of Government & Public Safety
Modernizing procurement, permitting, emergency response, and civic operations with software that meets government-grade requirements.
Agentic AdTech
AI-driven advertising infrastructure that automates media buying, creative optimization, and attribution at scale.
About
Mahdi Raza
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
Scaled Robinhood as head of growth to IPO, strategic advisor to Parafin, Persona
Charley Ma
Co-Founder, Managing Partner
Scaled Plaid, Ramp, and Alloy to $100M+ in revenue in each case as first business hire + head of growth.
Kasra Khadem
Partner
Previously at Human Capital, partnering with Anduril, Applied Intuition, Commure, Neuralink and more.
Pathlight is Mahdi Raza, Charley Ma, and Kasra Khadem. The team has spent equal amounts of time in the Bay Area and New York City. The result is a fund that thinks with Bay Area ambition and operates with New York practicality.
We invest from inception through Series A. Our portfolio is concentrated by design. Every company gets the kind of attention that comes from a team that treats Pathlight itself as a startup.
Our major investors are nonprofit universities, endowments, foundations, and hospital systems. Our first job is to drive returns on the capital they’ve entrusted to us by partnering with founders building the next generational companies. We take that seriously and want to work with founders that share that view.
Notes
Building and Scaling Superhuman's PLG Engine
July 22, 2025Thomson Reuters + Materia: A Milestone Acquisition
March 1, 2025