Kevin Niechen

Investment Team
San Francisco, CA
[overview]

Kevin is a member of the investment team, where he focuses on enterprise software.

Prior to 8VC, Kevin worked on systems architecture research with Professor Dan Abadi at the University of Maryland to build new primitives for distributed databases. He worked on applied research in large-scale ML models at Airbnb AI Labs. He was an early engineer at Neeva, a search engine startup, where he worked on ranking and built their first indexing pipeline.

Kevin graduated from the University of Maryland, where he competed in ACM-ICPC and created a class on reinforcement learning.

[Q&A]
Posts
News
Jul 31, 2024

Ready, AI, Hire: Announcing Our Investment in Tezi

Recruiting is a founder’s most important job. The returns on top talent, and the network effect of smart people pulling in smart people, are the not-so-secret secrets to our work at 8VC - and building Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, and Saronic, to name a few. Yet conventional hiring is slow and expensive. You need to ramp up in-house recruiters to overcome scaling bottlenecks (creating fixed costs for variable needs), or pay contract firms steep commissions (up to $20-40,000 for senior technical hires). $250 billion a year is spent on recruiting in the US, almost entirely on labor. Software only represents 2.6% of that spend, and is mostly mediocre. It’s also built for recruiters, not hiring managers, highlighting a bigger issue: recruiting outsources input away from a new hire’s future team, while steadily increasing overhead.

Posts
News
Jul 31, 2024

Ready, AI, Hire: Announcing Our Investment in Tezi

Recruiting is a founder’s most important job. The returns on top talent, and the network effect of smart people pulling in smart people, are the not-so-secret secrets to our work at 8VC - and building Palantir, Addepar, OpenGov, and Saronic, to name a few. Yet conventional hiring is slow and expensive. You need to ramp up in-house recruiters to overcome scaling bottlenecks (creating fixed costs for variable needs), or pay contract firms steep commissions (up to $20-40,000 for senior technical hires). $250 billion a year is spent on recruiting in the US, almost entirely on labor. Software only represents 2.6% of that spend, and is mostly mediocre. It’s also built for recruiters, not hiring managers, highlighting a bigger issue: recruiting outsources input away from a new hire’s future team, while steadily increasing overhead.

Posts
Apr 30, 2024

Scalable AI Architectures

Today, two neural architectures scale to the limits of available data and compute:

Posts
Apr 30, 2024

Scalable AI Architectures

Today, two neural architectures scale to the limits of available data and compute:

Posts
News
Apr 11, 2024

Announcing Our Investment in PeerDB

While models command the spotlight, the AI age ultimately depends on real-time, reliable data access - and this is true of countless traditional business processes. Today, Postgres is the de facto database for enterprises, SMBs, and developers, yet Change Data Capture (CDC) and data movement tools for Postgres represent a massive bottleneck. Picture the Ever Given wedged in the Suez Canal, with data as cargo.

Posts
News
Apr 11, 2024

Announcing Our Investment in PeerDB

While models command the spotlight, the AI age ultimately depends on real-time, reliable data access - and this is true of countless traditional business processes. Today, Postgres is the de facto database for enterprises, SMBs, and developers, yet Change Data Capture (CDC) and data movement tools for Postgres represent a massive bottleneck. Picture the Ever Given wedged in the Suez Canal, with data as cargo.

Posts
News
Sep 28, 2023

The Other 90%: Introducing the Aryn-8VC Partnership

Unstructured data is the undiscovered country of the enterprise, containing the institutional wisdom AI seeks to capture. Unlocking the value of that data has proved elusive, as both enterprise search and LLMs have fallen short individually. Aryn's mission is to help you answer questions from all of your data. To this end, Aryn is bringing generative AI to OpenSearch and data preparation - and bridging the gap from results to answers. 

Posts
News
Sep 28, 2023

The Other 90%: Introducing the Aryn-8VC Partnership

Unstructured data is the undiscovered country of the enterprise, containing the institutional wisdom AI seeks to capture. Unlocking the value of that data has proved elusive, as both enterprise search and LLMs have fallen short individually. Aryn's mission is to help you answer questions from all of your data. To this end, Aryn is bringing generative AI to OpenSearch and data preparation - and bridging the gap from results to answers. 

Posts
News
Jun 22, 2023

From Overload to Oversight: Announcing the Acryl & 8VC Partnership

It’s hardly news that we’re living in an era of information overload, with an unrelenting explosion in data volume, complexity, and fragmentation - most of it by popular demand. As user personas have multiplied, new tools and systems of record have cropped up faster than they can be managed. Despite massive data growth, there’s an increasingly acute shortage of data discoverability and transparency. Simply determining what lives where is surprisingly difficult. Perhaps most worrisome, the downstream consequences of data misplacement and breaking changes extend far and wide. 

Posts
News
Jun 22, 2023

From Overload to Oversight: Announcing the Acryl & 8VC Partnership

It’s hardly news that we’re living in an era of information overload, with an unrelenting explosion in data volume, complexity, and fragmentation - most of it by popular demand. As user personas have multiplied, new tools and systems of record have cropped up faster than they can be managed. Despite massive data growth, there’s an increasingly acute shortage of data discoverability and transparency. Simply determining what lives where is surprisingly difficult. Perhaps most worrisome, the downstream consequences of data misplacement and breaking changes extend far and wide. 

Posts
May 16, 2023

The Automated Code Testing Revolution is Underway: Announcing the SapientAI-8VC Partnership

AI and automation have become essential components in the developer's toolkit, transforming the way we build software and offering the best hope yet of meeting the unrelenting demand for scale, speed, and reliability that has come to characterize the cloud-native era. Whether as engineers or investors, when attempting to identify the essential tools amid a sea of contenders, context is everything. This is doubly true for generating test code - a realization that helped to guide the formation of 8VC’s newest portfolio company, SapientAI.

Posts
May 16, 2023

The Automated Code Testing Revolution is Underway: Announcing the SapientAI-8VC Partnership

AI and automation have become essential components in the developer's toolkit, transforming the way we build software and offering the best hope yet of meeting the unrelenting demand for scale, speed, and reliability that has come to characterize the cloud-native era. Whether as engineers or investors, when attempting to identify the essential tools amid a sea of contenders, context is everything. This is doubly true for generating test code - a realization that helped to guide the formation of 8VC’s newest portfolio company, SapientAI.

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