Leonis Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2021 with a focused mission: to discover and back the world’s next generation of AI-native talent. Co-headed by Jenny Xiao, a former OpenAI researcher, and Jay Zhao, a veteran venture investor, the firm operates at the intersection of machine learning research, engineering talent, and emerging startup ecosystems. Based in the U.S., Leonis targets early bets on founders with exceptional technical backgrounds and novel approaches to AI.
Leonis invests in AI-native startups at the pre-seed and seed stages, with an emphasis on technical teams often overlooked by traditional funds. The firm is especially drawn to founders emerging from GitHub, academic research, and deep engineering communities. Sectors of interest include industrial AI, infrastructure tools, automation, and foundational models applied across enterprise and verticalized applications.
In August 2025, Leonis Capital announced the close of its second fund: a $25 million AI Talent Fund. The fund is backed by institutional investors as well as executives and researchers from Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic.
The team leverages proprietary software to identify early technical signals from GitHub commits and research papers, enabling Leonis to discover high-potential founders before they gain mainstream VC attention.
This second vehicle builds on the momentum of Leonis’s $10 million debut fund, which has already seen substantial paper returns—including a 200x unrealized gain from its investment in MaintainX.
With the new fund, Leonis aims to continue identifying elite technical talent early and deploying capital with high conviction.
Leadership
Leonis Capital is led by Jenny Xiao, an early employee and researcher at OpenAI, and Jay Zhao, a seasoned VC with experience investing in AI infrastructure and deep tech startups. The leadership is supported by a network of eight research fellows with PhDs from institutions like MIT, Stanford, and Harvard, enhancing the firm’s edge in sourcing and evaluating highly technical founders.
Investment Strategy
Leonis applies a data-informed approach to sourcing, using internal tools to analyze GitHub activity, research citations, and open-source contributions to identify “under-the-radar” technical founders.
The fund writes small, high-conviction checks into early-stage AI startups and builds a strong relationship with founders early in their journey. The strategy is designed to optimize for power-law outcomes in AI, with a focus on founders capable of building category-defining technologies.
Notable Investments
Leonis’s portfolio includes:
Notable Exits
No public exits have been disclosed to date. The firm’s earliest investments are still maturing, with some tracking in top-decile performance bands according to Carta benchmarks.
