I invest early.
6 companies / 3 exits
I make angel investments in early stage startups, sometimes with cash, and other times as an advisor.
3 of the 6 have been acquired.
The whole portfolio.
4 investments and 2 advisory roles. Where a company has published a round or an outcome, it is on the row; where it has not, the row says nothing rather than guessing.
- OpenPipeInvestorReinforcement learning that trains AI agents to get better at the job.Acquired 2025CoreWeave
- OpenSaucedInvestorIntelligence on who actually builds open source, and how.Acquired 2024The Linux Foundation
- OrioleDATAAdvisorA storage engine that makes Postgres several times faster on modern hardware.Acquired 2024Supabase
- CrabNebulaInvestorThe company behind Tauri's app distribution, updates and security audits.$7.5M seed led by OSS Capital, 2023
- RavionInvestorAWS infrastructure that deploys itself, built for engineers and their agents.Y Combinator, W22
- ContendaAdvisorTurned recorded talks and streams into written developer content.
I write small checks, and I mostly follow people whose judgment I trust. Guillermo Rauch, David Khourshid and Swyx invest early too, and I am usually following one of them into the round.
Coverage.
Every claim on this page is somebody else's reporting or the acquirer's own announcement. Here is all of it, newest first.
- CoreWeave to Acquire OpenPipe, Leader in Reinforcement LearningCoreWeave, 2025
- CoreWeave to acquire OpenPipe, a Seattle-area startup that uses reinforcement learning to help companies build AI agentsGeekWire, 2025
- LFX Insights: A new way to understand open source projectsCNCF, 2025
- OrioleDB Patent: now freely available to the Postgres communitySupabase, 2025
- Seattle startup OpenPipe raises $6.7M to help companies reduce costs for LLM modelsGeekWire, 2024
- Oriole joins SupabaseSupabase, 2024
- Supabase Acquires OrioleDBHacker News, 2024
- After GitHub, Brian Douglas Builds a 'Saucy' StartupThe New Stack, 2023
- Strengthening Tauri: Our Partnership with CrabNebulaTauri, 2023
- Ravion: the agent-native cloud infrastructure platform for AWSY Combinator, 2022
Questions.
- Does Tejas Kumar invest in startups?
- Yes. I'm Tejas Kumar, and I make angel investments in early stage startups, sometimes with cash and other times as an advisor. I have backed 6 companies so far. 3 of them have been acquired, by CoreWeave, The Linux Foundation and Supabase.
- What does Tejas Kumar invest in?
- Developer tools and AI infrastructure, at the stage where the product is still an argument rather than a category. I have spent 25 years building on the web and I am an AI Engineer at IBM, so the companies I can actually help are the ones building for engineers.
- How big are the checks?
- Small. I am an angel, not a fund, and I do not lead rounds. I mostly follow people whose judgment I trust, and I am usually coming in alongside investors who have already done the work on the round.
- Can Tejas Kumar join as an advisor instead?
- Often, yes. 2 of the 6 companies here are advisory rather than financial: OrioleDATA and Contenda both had my time rather than my money. If what you need is help with developer relations, technical content, hiring engineers or the engineering itself, say so and we can talk about that instead of a check.
- How do you pitch Tejas Kumar?
- Book a slot on my calendar. Come with one paragraph on what you are building, one on why you are the person building it, and a deck if you have one. I read everything before the call.Book a slot
Building something early?
Book a slot on my calendar. Come with one paragraph on the product, one on why it is you building it, and a deck if you have one. I read everything before the call.
If this is about something other than a startup, booking me to speak and everything else about me are one page away.