Dawn Song

Professor, UC Berkeley; Angel Investor; Founder, Oasis Labs at independent

Reviewed Updated Jul 19, 2026

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Location Berkeley, CA
Check Size $5K-$50K (angel)
Last Verified Investment NeoCognition (Seed) — Apr 21, 2026
Social @dawnsongtweets LinkedIn
Stage Focus
pre-seed seed series-a
Sector Focus
ai ai-safety cybersecurity blockchain web3 privacy developer-tools

Background

Dawn Xiaodong Song is a Professor of Computer Science at the University of California, Berkeley and Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Responsible Decentralized Intelligence (RDI) 12. She earned her B.S. from Tsinghua University (1996), M.S. from Carnegie Mellon University (1999), and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley (2002) 3. She served as an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon (2002–2007) before joining the UC Berkeley EECS faculty in 2007 34.

Song’s research spans AI safety and security, agentic AI, deep learning, security and privacy, and decentralization technology 1215. She created BitBlaze, a platform for malware analysis whose techniques were later used in tools shipping with Google Chrome, and is widely recognized as the most-cited scholar in computer security by the AMiner Award 34.

Her honors include a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2010), Guggenheim Fellowship, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, NSF CAREER Award, IBM Faculty Award, MIT Technology Review TR35 Innovator Under 35 (2009), ACM Fellow (2019), IEEE Fellow, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2025), and appointment as an AI2050 Senior Fellow at Schmidt Sciences (2025) 131415. She was named on Inc.’s Female Founder 100 list and the Wired25 list of innovators 2.

Song is a serial founder as well as an academic. In 2018 she co-founded Oasis Labs, a privacy-preserving cloud-computing and blockchain startup where she served as CEO 467. Oasis Labs raised $45 million on July 9, 2018 from a syndicate led by Andreessen Horowitz’s a16z crypto fund, with Accel, Binance Labs, DCVC, Electric Capital, Foundation Capital, Pantera, Polychain, Metastable, and Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam participating 67. Earlier, she founded the mobile security startup Ensighta Security, which was acquired by FireEye 419. UC Berkeley Research also credits her with co-founding Menlo Security, though the company’s own founder list does not include her — most likely a scientific/technical co-founder role rather than an operational one 5.

In 2024 she co-founded Virtue AI, an enterprise AI safety and security platform, alongside Bo Li, Carlos Guestrin, and Sanmi Koyejo 910. Virtue AI raised $30 million in seed and Series A funding on April 15, 2025, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Walden Catalyst Ventures with participation from Prosperity7, Factory, Osage University Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, Amarjit Gill, and Chris Ré 910. In June 2026, Meta hired Song, Bo Li, and Sanmi Koyejo out of Virtue AI into Meta Superintelligence Labs, where Song became Vice President of AI Research reporting to Nat Friedman 1120.

Stated Thesis

(Self-reported. See Inferred Thesis for analysis of actual investment behavior.)

Song has described her motivation for building companies alongside academic research as translating research into real-world impact: “As we give birth to new ideas in research, it’s really nice to be able to see the ideas grow and mature and have real-world impact” 5.

Her public statements as CEO of Oasis Labs framed her thesis around user data ownership and privacy-preserving computation: “The Oasis platform aims to help users leverage and reclaim control over their data, and at the same time deliver superior performance and privacy capabilities” 6. She has consistently argued that users should not have to choose between privacy and the convenience of modern online services 4.

Her current research thrusts — AI safety and security, and frontier AI for program synthesis and cybersecurity 115 — closely track the sectors she has backed as an angel investor. She serves on the World Economic Forum AGI Global Council (2025–present) and was Program Co-Chair of ICLR 2020 1.

Inferred Thesis

Analysis based on 4 publicly verifiable angel investments cross-referenced with two aggregator profiles (Signal by NFX and Tracxn) 1617. The sample is small; percentages are not meaningful at this size, so qualitative patterns are used.

  • Stage: Every verified angel check is at seed or pre-seed (Together AI seed 2023, Eclipse pre-seed/Series A 2022, alphaXiv seed 2025, NeoCognition seed 2026) 812131718. Signal NFX places her “sweet spot” at ~$25K per check with a range of $5K–$50K, consistent with an academic angel writing early support checks alongside institutional leads rather than leading rounds 16.
  • Sector: Two dominant clusters — (1) AI infrastructure and agentic AI (Together AI, alphaXiv, NeoCognition) and (2) crypto/blockchain infrastructure (Eclipse, plus her own Oasis Labs). Signal NFX ranks her among top angels in Security, Web3/Blockchain, and AI at seed and pre-seed 16.
  • Founder profile: The verified investments skew heavily toward AI researcher-founders and academic technical founders — Yu Su (Sloan Research Fellow, Ohio State) at NeoCognition, the Together AI open-source generative team, alphaXiv’s AI-research-tooling founders, and Eclipse’s Solana-VM infrastructure team 8121318. This matches Song’s own founder profile and her position at Berkeley RDI.
  • Co-investor patterns: Signal NFX flags frequent co-investment overlap with Eric Schmidt, Dave Eisenberg, and partners at Lux Capital, Red Swan Ventures, and Susa Ventures 16. Lux Capital led Together AI’s seed alongside her check 8. Lip-Bu Tan appears both as a co-founder-backer of Virtue AI and as a co-angel investor in NeoCognition 912.
  • Geography: All verified investments are US-based, concentrated in the SF Bay Area 16.
  • Notable gap between founder role and angel activity: Despite being a prominent public voice on privacy and blockchain, her angel portfolio is now dominated by AI research tooling, not privacy or blockchain — reflecting the same 2023–2026 pivot in her research and company-founding activity (Virtue AI, Meta Superintelligence Labs).

Portfolio

Portfolio entries below reflect angel investments verified against a primary source and/or the two consistent aggregator profiles (Signal NFX, Tracxn). Companies she founded are listed separately with the “Founder” stage marker. Aggregator-only entries are marked so.

Company Year Stage Source
Oasis Labs 2018 Founder / CEO ($45M Series-equivalent led by a16z crypto, 2018-07-09) 67
Ensighta Security ~2010 (acquired by FireEye) Founder 419
Eclipse 2022-09-27 Angel — Pre-Seed and/or Seed (aggregator-only; not named in press release) 161718
Together AI 2023-05-15 Angel — Seed ($20M led by Lux Capital; Dawn Song explicitly named) 8
Virtue AI 2024 Co-Founder ($30M seed + Series A on 2025-04-15, led by Lightspeed and Walden Catalyst) 910
alphaXiv 2025-11-19 Angel — Seed ($7M led by Menlo Ventures and Haystack; Dawn Song listed by Tracxn/Signal NFX, not named in press release) 131617
NeoCognition 2026-04-21 Angel & founding advisor — Seed ($40M co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst; Dawn Song named as founding advisor in press release) 12

Note: This table represents Dawn Song’s publicly known angel checks plus companies she founded or co-founded. Signal NFX and Tracxn track 2–3 formal angel investments each; press-release confirmation exists for Together AI (Together’s own blog) and NeoCognition (PR Newswire). Eclipse and alphaXiv rely on aggregator listings that were not confirmed in the primary press announcements. As a working professor and founder, her non-monetary role as scientific advisor to many other startups is not captured here.

In Their Own Words

On research becoming real-world companies:

“As we give birth to new ideas in research, it’s really nice to be able to see the ideas grow and mature and have real-world impact.” 5

On why she founded Oasis Labs — user ownership of data:

“Blockchains are poised to revolutionize much of the way we live, but many developers and organizations have understandable concerns about performance and privacy limitations that are currently hindering their ability to embrace the technology. The Oasis platform aims to help users leverage and reclaim control over their data, and at the same time deliver superior performance and privacy capabilities.” 6

On the technical bet behind Oasis Labs:

“In our experiments we see performance orders of magnitude greater than ethereum. This architecture also supports far more computationally intensive tasks like machine learning and AI, which are not possible with today’s blockchain technologies.” 7

What Founders Say

No independently sourced founder testimonials from portfolio companies specifically about Dawn Song’s angel-investing or advising role were located during dedicated searching. Contextually, Fred Ehrsam (Coinbase co-founder and an Oasis Labs seed investor) said of her work: “It’s exciting to see talented people like Dawn and her team working on ways to transition the internet away from data silos” 6 — but this speaks to her as a founder/technologist, not as an investor in someone else’s company.

Sources

  1. Dawn Song, personal home page. https://dawnsong.io/ Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩↩↩

  2. Dawn Song, “Bio,” dawnsong.io. https://dawnsong.io/bio.html Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩

  3. “Dawn Song.” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dawn_Song Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩↩

  4. Berkeley Engineering, “Dawn Song: Privacy protector.” https://engineering.berkeley.edu/dawn-song-privacy-protector/ Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩↩↩↩

  5. UC Berkeley Research (Noyce Initiative), “A New Vision for Data Security.” https://vcresearch.berkeley.edu/uc-noyce-initiative/dawn-song Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩

  6. PR Newswire, “Oasis Labs Raises $45 Million to Launch Privacy-first Cloud Computing on Blockchain,” July 9, 2018. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/oasis-labs-raises-45-million-to-launch-privacy-first-cloud-computing-on-blockchain-300677175.html↩↩↩↩↩↩

  7. CoinDesk, “A16z Leads $45 Million Raise for Blockchain Startup Oasis Labs,” July 9, 2018. https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2018/07/09/a16z-leads-45-million-raise-for-blockchain-startup-oasis-labs↩↩↩↩

  8. Together AI blog, “Together’s $20M seed funding to build open-source AI and cloud platform,” May 15, 2023. https://www.together.ai/blog/seed-funding — explicitly names Dawn Song (“co-founder of Oasis Labs”) among the angel investors alongside Scott Banister, Jeff Hammerbacher, Alex Atallah, MC Lader, Lip-Bu Tan, Jakob Uszkoreit, and others. ↩↩↩↩

  9. BusinessWire, “Virtue AI Raises $30 Million in Seed and Series A Funding to Bridge the Critical AI Security Gap,” April 15, 2025. https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250415693312/en/Virtue-AI-Raises-30-Million-in-Seed-and-Series-A-Funding-to-Bridge-the-Critical-AI-Security-Gap↩↩↩↩

  10. The SaaS News, “Virtue AI Raises $30 Million in Funding,” April 2025. https://www.thesaasnews.com/news/virtue-ai-raises-30-million-in-funding/↩↩↩

  11. crypto.news, “Meta hires Oasis founder Dawn Song for AI safety push,” June 26, 2026. https://crypto.news/meta-hires-oasis-founder-dawn-song-for-ai-safety-push/↩

  12. PR Newswire, “NeoCognition Emerges from Stealth With $40 Million Seed Round to Advance Specialized Intelligence and Expert Agents,” April 21, 2026. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/neocognition-emerges-from-stealth-with-40-million-seed-round-to-advance-specialized-intelligence-and-expert-agents-302749108.html — names Dawn Song among “leading AI researchers” as founding advisors, alongside Lip-Bu Tan, Ion Stoica, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Luke Zettlemoyer. ↩↩↩↩

  13. PR Newswire, “alphaXiv Raises $7M Seed Round to Bridge the AI Research-to-Practice Divide,” November 19, 2025. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/alphaxiv-raises-7m-seed-round-to-bridge-the-ai-research-to-practice-divide-302619615.html — Menlo Ventures and Haystack lead, with participation from Shakti VC, Conviction Embed, Upfront Ventures, and named angels Eric Schmidt, Sebastian Thrun, Sara Hooker, and Gokul Rajaram. Dawn Song is not individually named in this release; aggregators (Signal NFX, Tracxn) list her as an angel in the round. ↩↩↩

  14. MIT Technology Review, “Innovator Under 35: Dawn Song.” http://www2.technologyreview.com/tr35/profile.aspx?TRID=812 Accessed July 2026. ↩

  15. Schmidt Sciences AI2050, “Dawn Song — AI2050 Senior Fellow (2025).” https://ai2050.schmidtsciences.org/fellow/dawn-song/ Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩

  16. Signal by NFX, “Dawn Song’s Investing Profile — Angel.” https://signal.nfx.com/investors/dawn-song Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  17. Tracxn, “Dawn Song — 2026 Portfolio & Founded Companies.” https://tracxn.com/d/people/dawn-song/__y4YMo9cfX6H5dvTYl4VEmyDPDylObG5PCSWm351Jbu8 Accessed July 2026. ↩↩↩↩↩

  18. BusinessWire (via Financial Content), “Eclipse Raises $15M for Customizable Solana Virtual Machine Layer 2 Technology,” September 27, 2022. https://markets.financialcontent.com/bpas/article/bizwire-2022-9-27-eclipse-raises-15m-for-customizable-solana-virtual-machine-layer-2-technology — announces Eclipse’s $9M seed (Tribe Capital, Tabiya) plus $6M pre-seed (Polychain-led) totaling $15M; does not individually name Dawn Song, whose participation is reported by aggregators 1617. ↩↩↩

  19. Berkeley IP&IRA, “Ensighta Security, Inc.” https://ipira.berkeley.edu/ensighta-security-inc Accessed July 2026. Ensighta was a UC Berkeley spinout co-founded by Dawn Song and acquired by FireEye. ↩↩

  20. Yahoo Finance / The Information (aggregated), “Meta hires Virtue AI founders,” June 25–26, 2026. https://finance.yahoo.com/technology/ai/articles/meta-hires-virtue-ai-founders-162132308.html — confirms Dawn Song, Bo Li, and Sanmi Koyejo joined Meta Superintelligence Labs; Song and Li report to Nat Friedman, Koyejo reports to Rob Fergus (FAIR). ↩