Vivek Gopalan

Investment Team
San Francisco, CA
[overview]

Vivek is a member of the investment team, where he focuses on data & software infrastructure and horizontal B2B SaaS. He also spends time on the Build program starting and incubating companies.

Prior to joining 8VC, Vivek was a software engineer on the core database group at 8VC portfolio company Yugabyte, building YugabyteDB, a high-performance distributed transactional database. Before that, he worked on machine learning pipelines for the Sales Intelligence team at Bloomberg.

Vivek studied Computer Science and Statistics & Data Science at Yale. He wrote his thesis on decentralized databases.

He is an avid F1 fan and an enjoyer of science fiction & fantasy, particularly Sanderson's Cosmere. He hails from Issaquah, Washington, and has spent time living in New York & various parts of Connecticut.

[Q&A]
Posts
Interview
May 6, 2025

Joe Chen and Jonathan Shen (Upwork) Fireside Chat

We were thrilled to feature Joe and Jonathan from Upwork at March's Chat8VC in San Francisco. We covered their journey from teams like Google Brain and Cruise, and their own startup, to leading AI efforts at Upwork—building Uma, a suite of specialized LLMs powering workflows for freelancers and clients across the platform.

Posts
Interview
May 6, 2025

Joe Chen and Jonathan Shen (Upwork) Fireside Chat

We were thrilled to feature Joe and Jonathan from Upwork at March's Chat8VC in San Francisco. We covered their journey from teams like Google Brain and Cruise, and their own startup, to leading AI efforts at Upwork—building Uma, a suite of specialized LLMs powering workflows for freelancers and clients across the platform.

Posts
News
Apr 30, 2025

Clear Eyes, Fuzzy Joins, Can’t Lose: Announcing Our Investment in Structify

Human-quality workflows need human-quality data, an axiom that has only grown truer in the AI-first enterprise. However, access to complete, high-signal data remains a limiting factor, given steep data provider fees, inflexible schemas, AI hallucinations, and scattered, inconsistent, and mutating sources. Customers don’t need to be data scientists to recognize shovel-ready datasets, but if they need to be data scientists to generate them reliably, data will always be rate-limiting.

Posts
News
Apr 30, 2025

Clear Eyes, Fuzzy Joins, Can’t Lose: Announcing Our Investment in Structify

Human-quality workflows need human-quality data, an axiom that has only grown truer in the AI-first enterprise. However, access to complete, high-signal data remains a limiting factor, given steep data provider fees, inflexible schemas, AI hallucinations, and scattered, inconsistent, and mutating sources. Customers don’t need to be data scientists to recognize shovel-ready datasets, but if they need to be data scientists to generate them reliably, data will always be rate-limiting.

Posts
News
Apr 8, 2025

Glimpse's $10M Series A to Rescue CPG Margins

For many consumers, the grocery aisle is the avatar of post-COVID inflation. Even as headline inflation has cooled (from 9.1% in June of 2022 to 2.8% in February of 2025), food prices remain stubbornly high, driving popular perceptions of gouging. $10 egg cartons, once confined to artisanal producers in Portland who know every hen by name, have hit big box stores. But grocery is a famously low-margin industry, and for CPG brands, the cost of doing business can be prohibitive. 

Posts
News
Apr 8, 2025

Glimpse's $10M Series A to Rescue CPG Margins

For many consumers, the grocery aisle is the avatar of post-COVID inflation. Even as headline inflation has cooled (from 9.1% in June of 2022 to 2.8% in February of 2025), food prices remain stubbornly high, driving popular perceptions of gouging. $10 egg cartons, once confined to artisanal producers in Portland who know every hen by name, have hit big box stores. But grocery is a famously low-margin industry, and for CPG brands, the cost of doing business can be prohibitive. 

Posts
Interview
Sep 3, 2024

Ramp & Vercel Fireside Chat

We were thrilled to host June's Chat8VC event alongside our portfolio companies Ramp & Vercel in NY. We were honored to feature Nik Koblov (Head of Engineering) and Nico Bevacqua (Head of UI / UX Engineering) from Ramp as well as Guillermo Rauch (CEO) and Lee Robinson (VP Product) from Vercel for a discussion anchored around the future of frontend engineering.

Posts
Interview
Sep 3, 2024

Ramp & Vercel Fireside Chat

We were thrilled to host June's Chat8VC event alongside our portfolio companies Ramp & Vercel in NY. We were honored to feature Nik Koblov (Head of Engineering) and Nico Bevacqua (Head of UI / UX Engineering) from Ramp as well as Guillermo Rauch (CEO) and Lee Robinson (VP Product) from Vercel for a discussion anchored around the future of frontend engineering.

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.

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