Saam Motamedi

Background

Saam Motamedi is a General Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley’s oldest and most prominent venture capital firms ¹. In August 2019, at age 26, he became Greylock’s youngest General Partner in its 54-year history, just three years after joining the firm as an associate in 2016 ².

Motamedi grew up in Houston, Texas, and holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University, where he was a Mayfield Fellow ³. At Stanford, he served as President of the student-managed Charles R. Blyth Investment Fund and President of Stanford Finance ³.

After graduating, Motamedi worked at Morgan Stanley’s Equity Derivatives Trading desk before returning to Silicon Valley in 2013 to join RelateIQ as a product manager ³. At RelateIQ, he focused on data products, translating machine learning capabilities into features for salespeople ⁴. Salesforce acquired RelateIQ in July 2014 for approximately $390 million, and the technology became the foundation for Salesforce Einstein ³.

Before joining Greylock, Motamedi co-founded Guru Labs, a machine learning-driven fintech startup focused on offline commerce automation ⁴. He joined Greylock as an associate in 2016 and was promoted to principal before becoming General Partner in 2019 ².

Since joining Greylock, Motamedi has been instrumental around multiple new company investments and has worked closely with founding teams helping them build and navigate product-market fit and scale ². His portfolio spans 14+ companies across cybersecurity, AI applications, and AI infrastructure, with collective valuations exceeding $10 billion ¹.

Stated Thesis

Motamedi publicly describes his focus as partnering with enterprise software entrepreneurs at the seed and early stages who are focused on new opportunities in intelligent applications, cybersecurity, AI, and data infrastructure ¹.

Motamedi has stated that AI will fundamentally transform enterprise software economics. In October 2024, he warned that traditional SaaS pricing models are obsolete, stating that companies need to transition from tools priced per seat to agents priced per outcome ³. He has publicly stated that 80-90% of new companies in his portfolio are usage-based, consumption-based, or outcome-oriented in their pricing ⁵.

He describes his investment philosophy as looking for founders with a fundamental market insight and a learner’s mindset, saying Greylock invests in “slope, not y-intercept” ⁴. He has stated that he prioritizes three core principles: selecting preconditions correctly through market identification and product definition, understanding AI’s transformative potential, and being customer-obsessed and highly technical while supporting founders around the clock ¹.

Motamedi has said he approaches his job “with a customer-service-oriented mindset,” being “available to support founders 24/7,” whether it is “a long whiteboard session to help define early product positioning, or a late-night dinner to help close a founding engineer” ¹.

Inferred Thesis

Based on 22 verified investments from Motamedi’s portfolio as listed on Greylock’s website and corroborated by press announcements:

Sector breakdown: Cybersecurity dominates Motamedi’s portfolio. 8 of 22 investments (36%) are cybersecurity companies: Abnormal AI, Apiiro, Cogent Security, Fable Security, Natoma, Opal Security, Upwind Security, and Wiz. AI infrastructure accounts for 6 of 22 (27%): Snorkel AI, Braintrust, Orb, Predibase, Modular, and Adept. AI applications represent 5 of 22 (23%): Cresta, Fermat Commerce, Resolve AI, Anthropic, and ResolveAI. The remaining 3 of 22 (14%) are earlier-career enterprise SaaS investments: Blend, Clockwise, and Spoke.

Stage distribution: Motamedi invests primarily at seed and Series A. Of investments where stage is known, he has led or co-led seed rounds in Abnormal AI (incubated 2018), Snorkel AI ($3.3M seed), Orb ($5.1M seed), Braintrust ($5.1M seed), Upwind Security (co-led seed), Opal Security (led seed), Resolve AI ($35M seed), Natoma, Cogent Security, and Fable Security. He has led Series A rounds in Cresta ($21M), Adept ($65M co-led), Snorkel AI ($12M), and Apiiro. His most recent verified follow-on is Resolve AI’s $125M Series A in February 2026 ⁶.

Geographic concentration: Motamedi’s portfolio is heavily concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, consistent with Greylock’s Menlo Park headquarters. Notable exceptions include Apiiro and Upwind Security, both founded by Israeli teams ^{7 8}.

Founder profile patterns: Motamedi shows a strong pattern of backing technical founders with deep domain expertise, frequently from Stanford or Google. Snorkel AI was founded by Stanford AI Lab researchers ⁹. Cresta was co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, former head of Google X ¹⁰. Adept was founded by co-authors of the Transformer paper from Google Brain ¹¹. Resolve AI was founded by former Splunk executives who co-created OpenTelemetry ⁶. Abnormal AI was founded by former TellApart (acquired by Twitter) and Google engineers ¹².

Incubation model: A distinctive feature of Motamedi’s approach is company incubation within Greylock’s offices. Abnormal AI was incubated at Greylock in 2018 ¹², and Snorkel AI received seed capital and office space from Greylock ⁹. This suggests Motamedi is willing to invest at the absolute earliest stage, even pre-product.

Co-investor patterns: GV (Google Ventures) appears across multiple Motamedi investments including Abnormal AI and Snorkel AI. Lightspeed Venture Partners has co-invested in Resolve AI and Snorkel AI. CyberStarts and Leaders Fund appear in Upwind Security alongside Greylock.

Notable gaps vs. stated thesis: Despite Greylock’s broader portfolio including consumer companies like Discord and Figma, Motamedi’s personal portfolio is almost entirely enterprise-focused. His stated focus areas of “intelligent applications, cybersecurity, AI, and data infrastructure” accurately describe his actual behavior, with cybersecurity being a larger concentration than his public messaging might suggest.

Portfolio

Note: Years marked with ~ are estimates based on founding year or earliest available data. Motamedi’s portfolio listed on Greylock’s website includes 22 active and 2 acquired companies. This table represents the majority of his publicly known investments.

In Their Own Words

On AI transforming enterprise software economics: “If you’re still thinking about things primarily through a seat-based lens, you’re toast” ³.

On AI as a broad enabling technology: “AI is an enabling technology wave and it’s shifting every category that we invest in” ²¹.

On the pace of model improvement: “The thing that continues to surprise even us is how quickly and how significantly these models are improving” ²¹.

On the future of AI co-pilots: “We are going to have hundreds of tuned co-pilots that make us 10 times more effective and 10 times more efficient at everything that we do” ²¹.

On pricing evolution for AI companies: “80, 85, 90 percent of these companies are usage-based or consumption-based or outcome-oriented in the way they price” ⁵.

On Resolve AI and the opportunity in software engineering: “Reimagining software engineering with AI might be the biggest opportunity in generative AI” ²².

On Adept AI’s founding team: “Adept’s team has literally invented” the Transformer architecture and other breakthroughs. “There are few startups with the same level of technical capability in AI” ¹¹.

On what he values in his career: “I take my work very seriously. If, looking back on my career, I see a handful of founders I’ve supported deeply — who’ve gone on to build market-defining companies from scratch — that will be something to be proud of” ¹.

On what makes the best investments: “Some of our best investments have actually been the most controversial ones” ⁴.

On AI and ML broadly: “I don’t think there’s an industry that AI and ML will not have a big impact on” ⁴.

On what he asks founders: He is known for asking founders the first-principles question: “What do you think is going to be true in 5-7 years that most people don’t believe today?” ¹.

What Founders Say

Alex Ratner, co-founder and CEO of Snorkel AI, on Motamedi’s early-stage support during the fundraising process: “It’s so rare to find people really will listen to you give that boring pitch deck – like Saam – again and again over the years and keep taking the time and effort to give constructive and critical feedback” ²³.

Evan Reiser, CEO and co-founder of Abnormal AI, on Greylock’s support during the company’s incubation and early customer development: “The Greylock team connected us with over 50 Fortune 500 CIOs and CISOs for input on how to apply our unique experience to solve their greatest security risks. Every security leader had the same problem: account compromise, executive impersonation, and financial loss due to targeted email attacks that bypass conventional email security” ¹².

Connections

• Board member, Abnormal AI — founding investor and board director alongside Asheem Chandna (Greylock Partner) ¹²
• Board member, Snorkel AI — joined board following Series A ⁹
• Board member, Cresta — founding investor and board member ¹⁰
• Board member, Adept — Greylock partner and board member ¹¹
• Board member, Apiiro — director ⁷
• Board member, Opal Security — board member ¹³
• Board member, Upwind Security — board member since September 2022 ⁸
• Board member, Orb — board member ¹⁴
• Board member, Braintrust — board member ¹⁷
• Board member, Resolve AI — led seed round ⁶
• Co-hosts Enterprise Software Innovators podcast with Evan Reiser (Abnormal AI CEO) ¹
• Former product manager, RelateIQ/Salesforce (2013-2016) ³
• Co-founder, Guru Labs — machine learning fintech startup ⁴
• Stanford University — Mayfield Fellow, President of Charles R. Blyth Investment Fund ³

Sources