Ann Lai

Ann Lai is the Founder and Managing Partner of Skeleton Key VC, a new firm focused on Science Tech and innovative capitalization models for startups. She is a triple Harvard graduate (B.A. in Physics and Chemistry, M.S. in Applied Mathematics for Biomechanical Systems, and PhD in fluid mechanics). Through her 15 years in research and academia, she excelled at adapting her creative problem solving to a broad range of applied science topics spanning MEMS for air pollution, wildfire propagation, biotoxin detection, shape memory alloy crystallization, flexible electronics, and microfluidic systems.

Since leaving the lab, she has worked her way from managing R&D/data science teams on Wall Street and at Riot Games to leading analytic growth teams at Silicon Valley startups. She is a pioneer in business data analytics, championing the adoption of big data to open up the aperture of venture capital deal sourcing and to standardize the diligence process to be more “apples-to-apples”. She has invested in or advised 30+ companies from Series Seed+ or A onward (current total valuation of $3B+ with 4 valued at over $500M and 5 at over $100M).