LDV Capital — LDV Capital Blog on Visual Technologies and AI — LDV Capital
LDV Blog
At LDV Capital's 2026 Annual General Meeting, Principal Ash Cleary outlined how visual technology and AI are driving the next wave of intelligent automation across legacy industries. Moving beyond basic digitization, advances in computer vision, machine perception, robotics, digital twins, and spatial intelligence are enabling autonomous decision-making in logistics, construction, manufacturing, and mining. The article explores trillion-dollar opportunities emerging from these technologies and why visual data is becoming the foundation for the future of industrial infrastructure.
We are thrilled to share a few photographs and stories from this year’s invite-only Annual General Meeting – a special event where our LPs connect in person with our team, portfolio companies and experts.
It was a pleasure to host entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and special guests such as Maria Gotsch, Andy Parsons, Mark Kalow, Fernando De La Torre, Thomas Knox, Rebekah Griesenauer, Hani Eskandari, Omar Issa, Rebecca Paoletti, Robert Levitan, Serge Belongie, Emi Gal, Summer Bedard, Dave Zohrob, Dawn Barber, Jeremiah Robison and many more!
Our Annual General Meeting was a true highlight – full of thoughtful conversations, valuable insights and genuine connection. We’re grateful to everyone who joined us and contributed to making it a success!
Our 12th Annual LDV Vision Summit brought together deep tech entrepreneurs, technologists, academics, researchers and investors for engaging discussions on innovations in cutting-edge visual tech and AI. We continue to be excited by the accelerating convergence of visual tech and AI across both the digital and physical worlds.
We were thrilled to welcome speakers from Insight Partners, Mayo Clinic, Harvard Medical School, Bek Ventures, 01 Advisors, University of Oxford, The Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence, and LocalGlobe among others.
A special thank you goes to our speakers and attendees!
We are honored to work with brilliant people every day!
Since founding in 2012, LDV Capital is a thesis-driven early-stage venture fund investing in people building businesses powered by visual technology and artificial intelligence. Our thesis = a majority of the data our brains analyze is visual. Therefore, the majority of the data artificial intelligence will analyze will also be visual across the light and electromagnetic spectrum.
People used to say that our thesis was cute, niche and science fiction. Now it is validated.
We invest horizontally across all sectors such as: agriculture, healthcare, nanotechnology, logistics, manufacturing, entertainment, mobility, construction, optics, sensors, life sciences and biotech, robotics, materials science, video, mapping, security and much more.
LDV Capital IV: We are investing out of our 4th fund which was announced in 2024.
LDV Capital I & II are returned. We continue to have significant upside potential across each of our funds thanks to our brilliant entrepreneurs, experts, team and LP partners.
Luciana Lixandru, Partner at Sequoia Capital, focuses on enterprise and consumer technology companies across Europe and co-leads Sequoia's early-stage investment business. She is a Director of Pennylane, Robco, Stripe, Tacto, and VEED, and is passionate about helping founders unlock their potential and think on a global scale. Luciana joined Sequoia in 2021 to help open its London office - while the firm had been partnering with founders in Europe for years, a team on the ground has enabled them to spot outliers earlier and partner more deeply. With a decade of experience in the European venture market, prior as a partner at Accel, Luciana has deep domain expertise, having backed giants like UiPath (PATH), Deliveroo (DROOF), and Miro, among others.
At our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Luciana and Evan discussed Luciana’s early investments, including UiPath – a company that initially leveraged computer vision and spent nearly a decade finding product–market fit before achieving major success. They also explored trends and early-stage investment opportunities in businesses harnessing visual technologies and AI. Check out the recording from our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit or read our shortened and lightly edited transcript.
Arcturus has created a volumetric video platform that captures and broadcasts sports action in full 3D. They redefine how we connect with our favorite sports moments by delivering compelling new camera angles for 2D broadcasters and new 3D sports experiences never possible before on mobile or immersive devices. Their SaaS platform delivers the capture, processing, production and distribution of this content. We are thrilled to partner with Steve Sullivan, Devin Horsman, Ewan Johnson, Fraser McArthur and the entire Arcturus team as they deliver the future of live 3D broadcast quality sports coverage.
We led their $2.3M seed round with participation from Myelin VC, Vanderbilt University and angel investors including Harvard Business School Alumni Angels of Greater New York.
Every robot, drone, self-driving car, delivery bot, and surgical assistant that claims “intelligence” is fundamentally a product of visual and/or electromagnetic perception systems. The success of Physical AI doesn’t start with neural networks or GPUs – it starts with cameras, sensors, and spectral scanners that give machines their first sense of reality.
Physical AI will not succeed until machines can truly see.
Evan Nisselson, Founder and General Partner at LDV Capital, first met Victor Riparbelli, Co-Founder & CEO at Synthesia, in November 2018 and shared his team’s vision to empower anyone to create video content without cameras or studios. In 2019, LDV Capital led their $3.1M Seed financing.
In January 2025, the company announced their $180 million in a Series D round led by NEA, with participation from WiL, Atlassian Ventures, PSP Growth and existing investors. Adobe Ventures made a strategic investment in April 2025. That same month, the company surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue. Synthesia is now the UK’s most valuable generative AI media company and the worldwide market leader in enterprise AI video. Most recently, the team announced Synthesia 3.0, the next era of video.
At out 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Evan and Victor discussed Victor’s journey, Synthesia’s rapid growth and the future potential of AI video, including the rise of video agents – the next big shift toward making videos interactive and personalized, evolving the medium beyond a one-way broadcasting format.
Meet Dr. Daniel Sodickson – Chief of Innovation in Radiology at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and an Expert at LDV Capital. In his book, “The Future of Seeing: How Imaging Is Changing Our World”, he traces humanity’s long quest to illuminate the invisible – from the first biological eyes that evolved in Earth’s ancient oceans to the telescopes, microscopes and MRI machines that map worlds beyond the reach of natural vision. Blending history, science and imagination, he reveals how imaging has reshaped medicine, altered economies and reframed our understanding of privacy and identity. Now, on the brink of an AI-driven revolution, Dr. Sodickson invites us to consider a future in which technology emulates not just our sight, but our very minds – changing how we see the world, each other and ourselves. Dan’s vision aligns with our fund’s thesis dating back to 2012.
We’re excited to welcome Ross Cooke to our LDV Capital team. We were impressed by his communication style, problem-solving skills and expertise in nanoscience, physics, chemistry of advanced materials and materials science. Ross is particularly interested in how visual technologies and AI can transform long-established industries where innovation can have an outsized impact, such as healthcare, energy and mining. He is also excited about opportunities in materials science and supply chain.
Earlier in May, we shared photographs and stories from this year’s invite-only LDV Capital Annual General Meeting (AGM) – a special event where our LPs connect in person with our team, portfolio companies and experts. Our Associate, Ash Cleary, presented a keynote to our LPs on visual technologies that will unlock beyond what we can see as humans. We’re now excited to share a few of the trends Ash showcased in his presentation with our wider LDV community.
With new multimodal models emerging almost weekly, staying current on computer vision and machine learning can be challenging. At our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit, Dr. Serge Belongie – Professor at the University of Copenhagen, Head of the Danish Pioneer Centre for AI, and LDV Capital Expert in Residence – shared key insights behind these advances.
It was a pleasure to host entrepreneurs, investors, researchers and special guests such as Maria Gotsch, Andy Parsons, Brian Cohen, Mark Kalow, Fernando De La Torre, Kristin Dana, Carlos Bhola, Thomas Knox, Matthew Zeiler, Rebekah Griesenauer, Hani Eskandari, Omar Issa, Rebecca Paoletti, Robert Levitan, Andres Glusman, Seth Haberman, Kelly Hoey, Medha Vedaprakash, Emi Gal, Adam Maher, Summer Bedard, Dave Zohrob, Dawn Barber, Jeremiah Robison and many more!
We are thrilled to partner with Fieldstone Bio because their microbial sensors can identify targets in the environment at massive scales. Existing methods rely on bulky, expensive equipment and lab processing that takes significant time. Fieldstone Bio's breakthrough enables faster remote sensing using off-the-shelf hyperspectral cameras.
We at LDV Capital participated in their $5M seed round led by Ubiquity Ventures and with participation from E14 Fund.
We’re thrilled to announce that our portfolio company Ezra is joining Function Health – the first personalized health platform offering access to over 160 advanced lab tests and one of the fastest-growing startups in the healthcare space. Ezra perfectly aligns with Function’s mission to empower 8 billion people to live 100 healthy years.
At our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit earlier this year, a panel of distinguished experts explored the future of materials science powered by visual tech and AI. Click the link below to hear from Dr. David Smith, Associate Chair and James B. Duke Distinguished Professor of ECE at Duke University; Dr. Kristin Schmidt, Strategy Assistant for Accelerated Discovery and Vice Chair of the Physical Sciences Council at IBM; Dr. Chirranjeevi Gopal, Co-Founder and CTO at Mitra Chem, the first lithium-ion battery materials manufacturer; Dr. Amanda Petford-Long, Director of the Materials Science Division at Argonne National Lab; and Ash Cleary, Associate at LDV Capital.
Our 11th Annual LDV Vision Summit was our most attended event to date, bringing together deep tech entrepreneurs, technologists, academics, researchers and investors for engaging discussions on cutting-edge visual tech and AI innovations. We were thrilled to welcome speakers from Sequoia Capital, NVIDIA, IBM, Kleiner Perkins, Phare Bio, IVP, Mitra Chem, BAM Corner Point, Duke University, Fortune, Argonne National Laboratory, Princeton University, The Pioneer Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Fieldstone Bio. Three of our LDV Capital portfolio companies also presented: Synthesia, DANNCE AI and ResiQuant.
We are very excited to partner with the fantastic deep tech team at ResiQuant that is developing a platform that utilizes agentic AI and computer vision to transform data into actionable, building-level insights. This empowers property owners and carriers to mitigate vulnerabilities, streamline workflows and enhance underwriting decisions.
We at LDV Capital led their $4M seed round with participation from Foothill Ventures, Pear VC, Alumni Ventures and angels.
We are thrilled to share that we have returned our LDV Capital I & II funds. We continue to have significant upside potential across each of our funds thanks to our brilliant entrepreneurs, experts, team and LP partners.
We continue investing out of our LDV Capital IV fund.
LPs say we are highly differentiated, disciplined, have high-quality sourcing and successfully create value by investing in category leaders at the earliest stages.
We are excited to be recruiting an Analyst to join our team to help us identify, analyze and evaluate investment opportunities. You will be a major contributor to all aspects of our fund from sourcing, market research, due diligence and supporting our portfolio companies.
In September 2021, Ash Cleary began his venture capital journey by joining Evan Nisselson and our LDV Capital team as an Analyst, investing out of Fund III as part of a two-year program. After successfully completing the program, Ash was promoted to Associate and now invests out of LDV Capital's fourth fund.
Check out his insights and reflections on the past three years—working with the team and collaborating with brilliant deep tech entrepreneurs worldwide, building businesses powered by visual technology and artificial intelligence.