infrastructure

infrastructure

infrastructure

Who We Are

We invest in infrastructure companies before they exist.

We don’t try to be “value add”.

We only succeed if we make a difference .

How We Work

We develop stories

Technical founders are exceptional builders, but communicating their vision to non-technical audiences such as investors, customers, and partners often requires a different skill set.

With deep technical background and hands-on operating experience, we work closely with founders to go deeper than surface-level storytelling, exploring fundamentally different possibilities and crafting clear, compelling narratives without oversimplifying what makes their technology powerful.


We develop founders

The transition from a deeply technical background to CEO is a unique and often challenging journey.

Drawing from founder, operator, and close advisory experience with early-stage companies, we listen carefully and help founders work through both the emotional and tactical challenges of growing into effective leaders.


We develop communities

Building developer and open source communities requires intention, consistency + trust.

With experience supporting developer ecosystems and a deep technical network, we provide both strategic guidance and practical distribution to help founders build new communities and achieve early product traction.


We develop engineering teams

Hiring engineers is one of the hardest parts of building a company, yet it has an outsized impact on long-term outcomes.

With experience as founders, recruiters and senior engineering leaders + access to a deep technical talent network built through years of working with early-stage teams, we help companies hire founding engineers, early engineering leaders, and build strong technical teams from the start.

Portfolio Highlights

The Essence Team

 

Timothy Chen

Managing Partner

Tim is the Managing Partner at Essence VC, with a decade of experience leading engineering in enterprise infra and open source communities / companies.

Prior to Essence, Tim was the SVP of Engineering at Cosmos, a popular open source blockchain SDK. Prior to Cosmos, Tim cofounded Hyperpilot with Stanford Professor Christos Kozyrakis leveraging decades of research to disrupt the enterprise infrastructure space, which later exited to Cloudera. Prior to Hyperpilot, Tim was early employee at Mesosphere and CloudFoundry.

Tim is also active in the open source space as an Apache member.

Naomi Walker

Head of Platform

Naomi is the Head of Platform at Essence VC and is passionate about supporting early-stage technical founders through their startup journey.

Prior to Essence, Naomi spent six years at CloserIQ helping VC-backed SaaS startups like Retool, Dataminr, and CircleCI scale their US organizations.

With over a decade of B2B GTM experience, Naomi has experience building out and leading sales, post-sales, marketing, and RevOps functions across both VC-backed and bootstrapped startups.