Ann Lai

Managing Partner, Skeleton Key VC

Ann Lai is the Founder and Managing Partner of Skeleton Key VC, a new firm focused on Science Tech, i.e. software services/platforms that accelerate scientific discoveries or the application of new sciences into our day-to-day. Ann is a triple Harvard graduate (B.A. in Physics and Chemistry, M.S. in Applied Mathematics for Biomechanical Systems, and PhD in fluid mechanics), all by the age of 25. Through her 15 years in research and academia, she excelled at adapting her creative problem solving to a broad range of applied science topics from MEMS for air pollution to wildfire propagation to biotoxin detection at Los Alamos National Laboratory to shape memory alloy crystallization to flexible electronics to microfluidic systems. When Ann transitioned from academia to business, she worked her way from managing R&D/data science teams at Majestic Research and at Riot Games to leading analytic growth teams at Silicon Valley startups. Ann has worked in venture capital for the last 8 years, championing the adoption of big data to open up the aperture of 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).