Cota Capital has appointed Daniel Karp as a Partner, strengthening its investment team as the San Francisco-based firm expands its focus on emerging enterprise technologies. Karp will concentrate on backing technical founders developing infrastructure technologies across areas including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, networking, semiconductors, data management, optics, and developer tools. His role will span investments from the earliest stages of company formation through later phases of growth and scale.
Deepening Enterprise Infrastructure Expertise
The appointment adds an investor with experience across venture capital, corporate development, engineering, product management, and technology company building. Cota Capital focuses on what it describes as “Net New” enterprise challenges, referring to technological shifts that create entirely new problems and opportunities requiring new approaches. The firm invests in early-stage companies working across enterprise and AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, vertical AI, developer tools, and physical AI.
Karp's investment background closely aligns with those areas, particularly technologies underpinning cloud infrastructure and AI workloads. He joins Cota from Cervin Ventures, where he served as a General Partner and invested primarily in early-stage enterprise software businesses. His experience also includes evaluating infrastructure technologies across networking, data centers, security, and semiconductor markets.
Career Across Technology and Investing
Before joining Cervin Ventures, Karp worked on Cisco's Investments and M&A team, participating in investments and acquisitions related to networking, cloud computing, and data center technologies. He previously held business development and product management positions at Microsoft, including roles connected with Azure and Microsoft's Startup Business Group. These positions provided him with experience across both large-scale technology platforms and emerging technology companies.
Karp began his venture capital career at Amiti Ventures, where his investment activities focused on semiconductor and cybersecurity businesses. Earlier, he worked as an ASIC engineer developing technologies for mobile baseband infrastructure and flash memory controllers, giving him direct experience in hardware and semiconductor engineering. That technical background has subsequently informed his investment approach toward infrastructure companies and technically complex enterprise products.
Supporting Technical Founders
Cota Capital founder and Managing Partner Bobby Yazdani said the firm has worked with Karp on investments previously and highlighted his combination of technical expertise and investment experience. Yazdani said Karp's understanding of infrastructure markets should strengthen Cota's ability to identify promising technical founders during the earliest stages of company development. The appointment comes as advances in AI and enterprise computing continue to generate demand for new infrastructure, security, networking, and data-management technologies.
Karp said he sees the current technology cycle as an important period for the creation of companies that could become foundational businesses in future enterprise computing markets. At Cota, he intends to work closely with founders developing infrastructure capable of supporting increasingly complex AI and enterprise workloads. His investment mandate is expected to emphasize businesses addressing technology challenges emerging from major shifts in computing architectures and enterprise software.
Cota Capital's Investment Strategy
Cota Capital positions itself as an early-stage investment firm focused on technologies designed to address new enterprise challenges rather than incremental improvements to existing systems. Its strategy combines technology-focused investing with hands-on support for founders as companies progress from inception toward commercial scale. Karp's appointment broadens the firm's internal expertise across several areas that are becoming increasingly important as AI adoption changes enterprise computing requirements.
By adding Daniel Karp as a Partner, Cota Capital is reinforcing its focus on infrastructure-intensive enterprise technologies at a time of rapid change across AI, cybersecurity, networking, and computing. His background spanning engineering, major technology companies, corporate development, and venture investing brings additional technical depth to the firm's early-stage investment strategy. The appointment positions Karp to play a central role in identifying and supporting founders building technologies intended to form part of the next generation of enterprise infrastructure.