James joined Lightspeed in 2024 to partner with founders in AI and infrastructure.

Prior to Lightspeed, James was a partner at Zetta Venture Partners, where for 6 years he backed teams from inception building AI-native applications and infrastructure, like Weaviate, Argilla, and Cleric.

James developed early conviction in AI when, in 2018, he found the Word2Vec paper. Its concise demonstration that ‘king – man + woman = queen’ in embedding space was the epiphany that catalyzed James to devote his investing career to identifying and enabling AI’s most ambitious founders.

“AI has reshuffled the deck. For the first time in two decades, startups have wide latitude to scale novel, AI-native companies in the face of incumbents whose business models, products, and organizational incentives are premised on old technology. My job is to find, galvanize, and give every available resource to the founders capitalizing on AI’s replatforming opportunity.”

James grew up in Brisbane, Australia, and holds a degree in economics from UC Berkeley. He is an avid vinyl collector & DJ, and on weekends can usually be found on a bike, in a boat, or up a mountain.