Michael Dempsey

Managing Partner at compound-ventures

Reviewed Updated Apr 25, 2026

This profile is AI-generated. If you spot an error, please help us fix it by sharing a URL to the correct information.

Location New York, NY
Check Size $400K-$1.5M
Last Verified Investment Plural Energy (Seed) — May 30, 2024
Social @mhdempsey LinkedIn
Stage Focus
pre-seed seed series-a
Sector Focus
AI machine-learning robotics deep-tech crypto biotech healthcare materials-science autonomous-vehicles decentralized-AI

Background

Michael Dempsey is the Managing Partner at Compound, a thesis-driven, research-centric investment firm based in New York that invests at the early stage in deeply technical and science-driven areas including AI/ML, robotics, biology and healthcare, crypto, energy, and materials science 12. He was formally announced as Managing Partner in March 2022, having joined the firm in 2016 when it was being relaunched 34.

Dempsey was born in Los Angeles, grew up in Boston, and graduated from New York University in 2011 4. After college he spent roughly 2.5 years at Crane Partners, a small multi-strategy hedge fund where he worked across cross-border private equity, public equities, derivatives, and venture capital, eventually leading the firm’s early-stage tech investments 4. He was an early employee (among the first 15) at the predictive analytics startup CB Insights, where he helped build the data and research team and specialized in emerging technologies including drones, space, VR/AR, food tech, and international venture capital 41. Before joining Compound he was on the investment team at Rothenberg Ventures, leading seed-stage Frontier Tech investments in space, robotics, drones, and autonomous vehicles 4.

Compound has reportedly grown to “a little north of $200 million under management across several small funds” 5. The firm operates from 414 Broadway in New York and the team includes General Partner David Hirsch, Partners 0xSmac and Shelby Newsad, CFO Tara Eckert, and venture partners specializing in computational biology, AI, robotics, and crypto 2.

Stated Thesis

Compound publicly describes itself as “a Thesis-Driven, Research-Centric Investment Firm” focused on “Helping accelerate the futures that our founders believe in” 2. Dempsey has stated that the firm’s edge is “understanding mismatches in time horizons between what’s technologically possible and what other people think is possible” 6.

In his own framing, Dempsey defines deep tech as “trying to solve a problem that a subset of people think is largely impossible, or rather largely impossible on the prescribed time horizon” 6. He has also said that Compound seeks “post-science project investing” — opportunities in emerging categories where there is at least some commercial viability — and on his personal site writes, “if it’s a little more than a science project, I’d love to learn about it” 47.

He has publicly described an explicit power-law fund model: “We lose money 40% of the time is our model and if we’re right on two out of 25 companies, we’ll have very good returns” 5. On portfolio shape he has stated that the firm develops year-by-year theses on sector trajectories, “acknowledging 80% may prove wrong while aiming for highly accurate predictions in the remaining 20%” 8.

Inferred Thesis

This analysis is based on 13 verified investments where Dempsey or Compound participation is confirmed by a primary or contemporaneous press source. Compound’s full portfolio listed on its website is materially larger than this verified subset, so percentages below should be read as directional rather than statistically definitive.

Sector distribution (13 verified investments): AI / ML / autonomous systems is the dominant sector — Wayve, Runway, Deepgram, Prime Intellect, Orbital Materials, and Fort Robotics together account for 6 of 13 (46%). Crypto/blockchain is a clear secondary theme — The Graph, Livepeer, Stacks (Blockstack), and Plural Energy account for 4 of 13 (31%). Healthcare / biotech accounts for 3 of 13 (23%) — Tia, Talkspace, and Bionaut Labs. Compound’s own published portfolio page additionally lists ~22 healthcare/biology companies and ~13 crypto companies, suggesting these categories are larger in the full portfolio than the verified subset implies 9.

Stage distribution: Of the 13 verified rounds, 7 are seed or pre-Series A (Wayve seed, Deepgram seed, The Graph seed, Orbital Materials seed, Prime Intellect seed, Plural Energy seed, Bionaut Labs early stage) and 6 are Series A or later follow-ons (Runway Series A, Tia Series A, Livepeer Series A, Fort Robotics Series B, Talkspace Series D). Signal by NFX lists Dempsey’s check size range as $400K–$1.5M with a $1M sweet spot, consistent with seed-stage initial checks 10. Dempsey has confirmed the firm does “Seed through Series B follow-on investment” with “typically 4-year deployment periods” 5.

Geographic focus: Compound is New York-based and several portfolio companies are NYC-based (Runway, Talkspace, The Graph). However the verified portfolio is internationally distributed: Wayve (London/Cambridge UK), Orbital Materials (London UK), Prime Intellect (Europe). This is consistent with Dempsey having co-led Wayve’s seed alongside Berlin-based Fly Ventures and his stated openness to founders globally 11.

Founder profile patterns: Dempsey favors deeply technical founders, frequently with PhD-level research backgrounds (Wayve’s Alex Kendall — Cambridge PhD; Orbital Materials’ Jonathan Godwin — DeepMind alum; Prime Intellect — decentralized AI researchers). He has stated he “fundamentally” does not believe “all founders are good founders” and emphasizes founder-product fit 8.

Co-investor patterns: Across the verified portfolio, frequent co-investors include Lux Capital (Runway), Fly Ventures (Wayve, Orbital Materials), Amplify Partners (Runway), Multicoin Capital (The Graph), CoinFund (The Graph), Khosla Ventures (Bionaut Labs), Distributed Global (Prime Intellect), Necessary Ventures (Plural Energy), Volt Capital (Plural Energy), and Maven11 (Plural Energy). Signal by NFX additionally lists frequent network co-investors including John Doerr, Charles Hudson, and Satya Patel 10.

Notable patterns vs. stated thesis: The stated thesis emphasizes equally AI, crypto, biology, and energy/materials. The verified portfolio confirms these but shows AI/ML as the largest single category and a distinct emerging cluster around decentralized AI (Prime Intellect) and AI-for-materials (Orbital Materials) — both bridging two of Compound’s stated focus areas. Dempsey has been openly skeptical of humanoid robotics specifically, stating “I’m relatively anti-humanoid robots” — a contrarian stance against a popular 2024-2025 robotics narrative 6.

Notable gap: Despite Compound’s website prominently listing materials science as a focus area, the verified portfolio includes only Orbital Materials in that category. Most “frontier” / energy / materials portfolio companies on Compound’s published portfolio page lacked the public funding announcements needed for individual citation in this profile.

Portfolio

Company Year Stage Source
Deepgram 2017 Seed 12
Stacks (Blockstack) 2017-2018 Token sale / early 7
Wayve 2018 Seed (co-led) 11
The Graph 2019 Seed 13
Livepeer 2019 Series A 14
Bionaut Labs 2019 Early stage ($20M total) 15
Talkspace 2019 Series D 16
Tia 2020-05 Series A 17
Runway 2020-12 Series A 18
Fort Robotics 2021-03 Series B 19
Orbital Materials 2022 Seed 20
Prime Intellect 2024-04 Seed 21
Plural Energy 2024-05-30 Seed 22

This table represents 13 of an unknown larger set — Compound’s website lists 60+ portfolio companies across automation, healthcare/biology, crypto, and other sectors 9. The entries above are the rounds with confirmed primary or contemporaneous press citations connecting Dempsey/Compound to the investment. Many portfolio companies on Compound’s site (e.g. Achira, Cellvoyant, Conception, Dapper Labs, Arbitrum, Compound Finance, Threshold) were not included in the table because contemporaneous round-level citations linking Compound to the specific round could not be independently verified within the time budget for this profile.

In Their Own Words

“We’re best at understanding mismatches in time horizons between what’s technologically possible and what other people think is possible.” — Michael Dempsey, Infinite Frontiers interview 6

“Deep tech is trying to solve a problem that a subset of people think is largely impossible, or rather largely impossible on the prescribed time horizon.” — Michael Dempsey, Infinite Frontiers interview 6

“It never was clear to me why venture was so consensus-driven. Hedge funds are all about information asymmetry.” — Michael Dempsey, Moth Fund interview 8

“I fundamentally don’t believe that all founders are good founders… founder product fit is very real.” — Michael Dempsey, Moth Fund interview 8

“I’m relatively anti-humanoid robots… For labor arbitrage, purpose-built machines are far better suited.” — Michael Dempsey, Infinite Frontiers interview 6

“AI is at its maximally obvious point today. There’s massive consensus across the entire industry.” — Michael Dempsey, The Splitting podcast, August 2025 5

“We lose money 40% of the time is our model and if we’re right on two out of 25 companies, we’ll have very good returns.” — Michael Dempsey, The Splitting podcast, August 2025 5

“All venture firms decay over time. They don’t compound over time as much as people think.” — Michael Dempsey, The Splitting podcast, August 2025 5

“Be known for something otherwise we think you’re known for nothing, and that’s the worst place to be.” — Michael Dempsey, The Splitting podcast, August 2025 5

“If I believe in a future I should just continually bet on that future and keep losing money until I don’t.” — Michael Dempsey, The Craft of Investing interview 23

“I don’t think about doing TAM analysis almost ever at the seed stage. It’s binary for me — is this big enough to be a massive, a hundred million dollars plus a year business? or not?” — Michael Dempsey, Inquisitive VC interview 24

“Wayve is building truly scalable autonomy by innovating on the bleeding edge of bayesian deep learning (BDL), reinforcement learning (RL), and more.” — Michael Dempsey, on the Wayve seed investment, Medium 11

“We’re honored to partner with the entire Plural team as they accelerate towards enabling at-scale funding of renewable energy projects, big and small.” — Michael Dempsey, Plural Energy seed announcement, May 2024 22

What Founders Say

No independently sourced founder testimonials found. Public sources confirm Dempsey’s close professional relationships with founders such as Alex Kendall (Wayve) and Cristóbal Valenzuela (Runway), but specific first-person quotes from these or other Compound portfolio founders describing the working relationship with Dempsey were not located in the time budget for this profile. Cristóbal Valenzuela’s December 2020 Series A announcement names “Michael Dempsey at Compound Ventures” as a participating investor but does not include a testimonial-style quote about the working relationship 18.

Connections

  • Co-investor network on Wayve seed (2018) — Co-led with Gabe Matuschka of Fly Ventures (Berlin); Dempsey and Matuschka both joined Wayve’s board following the round 11
  • Frequent crypto co-investors — The Graph seed alongside Multicoin Capital (lead) and CoinFund 13
  • Frequent AI co-investors — Runway Series A alongside Amplify Partners (lead, Sarah Catanzaro and Sunil Dhaliwal) and Lux Capital (Zavain Dar) 18
  • Compound team — works with General Partner David Hirsch (firm co-builder), Partners 0xSmac and Shelby Newsad, and venture partners including Drew Gray (AI/Robotics, who introduced Dempsey to Wayve), John Palmer (Crypto), Ron Boger (Computational Biology), and Dan Zigmond (Data Science & AI) 211
  • Prior employer: CB Insights — early employee on the data and research team 4
  • Prior employer: Rothenberg Ventures — investment team member focused on Frontier Tech (space, robotics, drones, autonomous vehicles) before joining Compound 4

Sources

  1. Compound, “Michael Dempsey” team page, accessed April 2026. https://www.compound.vc/team/michaeldempsey↩↩

  2. Compound, “About us” page, accessed April 2026. https://www.compound.vc/about↩↩↩↩

  3. Compound (Medium), “Behaving As If. Announcing Mike Dempsey as the Managing…”, March 11, 2022. https://compoundvc.medium.com/behaving-as-if-76c8416146f↩

  4. Michael Dempsey, “About” page on personal site, accessed April 2026. https://www.michaeldempsey.me/about.html↩↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  5. The Splitting, “The Past, Present, and Future of AI, Robotics, Venture Capital, and Crypto — Michael Dempsey, Managing Partner, Compound,” August 14, 2025. https://www.thespl.it/p/the-past-present-and-future-of-ai↩↩↩↩↩↩↩

  6. Infinite Frontiers, “Resolving Mismatched Time Horizons with Compound’s Michael Dempsey,” accessed April 2026. https://infinitefrontiers.io/conversations/resolving-mismatched-time-horizons-with-compounds-michael-dempsey/↩↩↩↩↩↩

  7. Compound Crypto, “About,” accessed April 2026. https://crypto.compound.vc/about↩↩

  8. Moth Fund, “Michael Dempsey: Managing Partner at Compound,” accessed April 2026. https://mothfund.substack.com/p/michael-dempsey-managing-partner↩↩↩↩

  9. Compound, “Portfolio,” accessed April 2026. https://www.compound.vc/portfolio↩↩

  10. Signal by NFX, “Michael Dempsey’s Investing Profile — Compound Managing Partner,” accessed April 2026. https://signal.nfx.com/investors/michael-dempsey↩↩

  11. Michael Dempsey (Medium), “Scaling Autonomous Vehicles with Machine Learning — Our Investment in Wayve,” accessed April 2026. https://medium.com/@mhdempsey/scaling-autonomous-vehicles-with-machine-learning-our-investment-in-wayve-4d9bcf127932↩↩↩↩↩

  12. Crunchbase News, “Nvidia Invests In Deepgram For The Future Of Voice Recognition” (referencing Sept 2017 seed round led by Y Combinator and Compound), accessed April 2026. https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/nvidia-invests-deepgram-future-voice-recognition/↩

  13. FinSMEs, “Graph Protocol Raises $2.4M in Seed Funding,” February 2019. https://www.finsmes.com/2019/02/graph-protocol-raises-2-4m-in-seed-funding.html↩↩

  14. TechCrunch, “Decentralized video infrastructure platform Livepeer raises $8M Series A,” June 17, 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/06/17/decentralized-video-infrastructure-platform-livepeer-raises-8m-series-a/↩

  15. Crunchbase News, “Khosla-backed Bionaut Labs Exits Stealth Mode With $20M,” March 2021 (financing received in 2019). https://news.crunchbase.com/health-wellness-biotech/khosla-backed-bionaut-labs-exits-stealth-mode-with-20m/↩

  16. TechCrunch, “Talkspace picks up $50 million Series D,” May 29, 2019. https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/29/talkspace-picks-up-50-million-series-d/↩

  17. TechCrunch, “Tia gets over $24 million to build a network of holistic health clinics and virtual services for women,” May 28, 2020. https://techcrunch.com/2020/05/28/tia-health-gets-over-24-million-to-build-a-network-of-holistic-health-clinics-and-virtual-services-for-women/↩

  18. Cristóbal Valenzuela (Runway / Medium), “Runway raises $8.5M Series A,” December 16, 2020. https://medium.com/runwayml/runway-raises-8-5m-series-a-9125f8007c79↩↩↩

  19. FORT Robotics press release, “FORT Robotics Closes on $13m in Funding,” March 18, 2021. https://www.fortrobotics.com/news/press-release-fort-robotics-closes-on-13m-in-funding↩

  20. Toyota Ventures (Medium), “Foundation Models for Materials Discovery: Our Investment in Orbital Materials,” accessed April 2026. https://medium.com/toyota-ventures/foundation-models-for-materials-discovery-our-investment-in-orbital-materials-ce5d93847f↩

  21. PRNewswire, “Prime Intellect Secures $5.5M in Seed Funding Co-Led By Distributed Global and CoinFund to Advance Its Decentralized and Collaborative AI Ecosystem,” April 23, 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/prime-intellect-secures-5-5m-in-seed-funding-co-led-by-distributed-global-and-coinfund-to-advance-its-decentralized-and-collaborative-ai-ecosystem-302124585.html↩

  22. PRNewswire, “Plural Energy Raises $2.33M to Pioneer On-chain Investing for Renewable Energy Projects,” May 30, 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/plural-energy-raises-2-33m-to-pioneer-on-chain-investing-for-renewable-energy-projects-secures-solaris-as-first-investment-opportunity-302159694.html↩↩

  23. jdahl Substack, “Michael Dempsey on The Craft of Investing in the Future,” accessed April 2026. https://jdahl.substack.com/p/michael-dempsey-on-the-craft-of-investing↩

  24. The Inquisitive VC (Medium), “The Inquisitive VC: Michael Dempsey — Compound VC,” January 27, 2021. https://medium.com/the-inquisitive-vc/the-inquisitive-vc-michael-dempsey-compound-vc-9ce845ac327↩