Alexander Kolicich is a founding partner at 8VC, backing IT and Bio-IT companies after starting out as an engineer at Google, Palantir and Clarium.
Worth knowing
He has led growth-stage investments in companies like AppDirect, C2FO and Helion Energy, and he judges deep technical companies from the inside, having built product alongside early teams rather than only reading their decks. He works closely with founders in enterprise software, biotech infrastructure and defense-adjacent AI. Canadian founders raising in Silicon Valley for hard technical products should write.
Story
Alexander studied software engineering at Waterloo and economics at Toronto, finishing both around 2008, then went to Silicon Valley as an engineer. He worked at Google Research, including on Street View, joined the early quantitative engineering team at Clarium alongside Joe Lonsdale, and advised the early Palantir team on product. That engineering grounding took him into investing, first as a principal at Mithril Capital Management working with Peter Thiel, then as a partner at Formation 8, and now at 8VC in San Francisco. He keeps an eye on home through C100 and the Toronto-Waterloo corridor, which he describes as going through a new Renaissance of startups.
Highlights
- Founding Partner and CIO, 8VC, San Francisco
- Director and advisor, Orca Bio
- Former investor and advisor, Blend Labs
- B.SE Software Engineering, University of Waterloo; MA Economics, University of Toronto
- Member, C100
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