Steven Lee

Founder @SevenStars_VC. Lifelong Fan @Dodgers.

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

I’m thrilled to announce the launch of my $40M pre-seed and seed-stage fund, @SevenStars_VC, where I’ll be focused on partnering with visionary founders building enduring AI application companies across consumer and enterprise technology.

Seven Stars is deeply personal. It’s named after my parents, who immigrated from South Korea and started a clothing small business in Downtown Los Angeles - Seven Star Fashion. Their tireless work ethic gave me a future and inspires me to show up for founders with that same dedication.

I’m incredibly grateful to our founders, limited partners, co-investors, advisors, and my family for their unwavering support. Read more via @agarfinks in @FortuneMagazine! https://t.co/swpKcZgbey

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

We raised another $106M at a $2.6B valuation since announcing our last round three weeks ago.

Corgi has grown exponentially in the past couple of months, but we're only just getting started transforming one of the largest sectors in the US economy: insurance.

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Honored to represent @SevenStars_VC on the 2026 @Forbes Midas Brink List. Grateful to the founders who trust us to be part of their journey, and to my Seven Stars partners for making this possible! https://t.co/uurN9CD4IF

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Seven Stars is proud to support @OriginLabAI in their $8M seed round led by @lightspeedvp. Origin is bridging gaming and AI by helping video game companies license high-quality data to world-model builders.

Congratulations to @colincarrier, Margot, Antoine, and the Origin Lab team on this milestone. They’re hiring! https://t.co/Ko5hmISzPh

[TechCrunch @TechCrunch]

Origin Lab raises $8M to help video game companies sell data to world-model builders https://t.co/KGV5GVp8jY

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

We @SevenStars_VC are thrilled to triple down and deepen our partnership with @Nico_Laqua, @emily_yuan_, and the @UseCorgi team. Read more about their $160M Series B at a $1.3B valuation in their @Forbes exclusive: https://t.co/RJoiQpira0

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

Today, @UseCorgi is announcing a $160M Series B at a $1.3B valuation led by TCV.

This new round of funding will help us scale what we've built and expand into new verticals including trucking, payroll, and small business.

This follows our $108M Series A that we announced 16 weeks ago, bringing total funding to over $268M.

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Congrats on a legendary run, BK! I learned so much from partnering with you on @ElevenLabs, @trymirage, and @sports_district, and I know you’ll continue to be an incredible partner to founders at your new fund.

[Bryan Kim @kirbyman01]

PERSONAL UPDATE: After 5+ years, I am leaving @a16z to start a fund! This was the toughest career decision of my life. I learned from the best partners and was privileged to work with incredible founders. So why leave? It is simply time to build. More to come on this.

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Excited to see @nakul launch Knuckle Up. Real operating lessons from legendary founders who have actually built iconic companies, not recycled startup talking points. Strong first episode with Frank Slootman!

[Nakul Mandan @nakul]

Building a company is a confrontational act.

Introducing Knuckle Up: conversations with people who’ve operated at the highest level.

Recruiting. Culture. Intensity. The inner game of being a CEO.

First episode with Frank Slootman drops today.

Trailer ↓

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Excited to double down in @Doctronic’s Series B round! Congrats to @MattPavelle, Dr. Adam Oskowitz, and team for building one of the most exciting companies in healthcare. They’re making care faster and more affordable, with 15x ARR growth in 6 months and now over 24M AI consultations. https://t.co/HJ9A6EJMr5

[Mati Staniszewski @mati]

Today, @elevenlabs is announcing a $500M Series D at an $11B valuation, led by Sequoia, with a16z quadrupling down and ICONIQ tripling down.

It reflects the trust of customers and partners building at the frontier alongside us - and gives us momentum to ship even faster.

[Naman Ambavi @namanambavi]

I’ve spent the last 6 years building for pharmacies in India, to the heart of the AI boom in SF.

Today, we’re coming out of stealth with @oximyhq and joining the @ycombinator W26 batch.

We are building the System of Record for Enterprise AI Usage. 🧵

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Another big milestone for @SkildAI. Congrats @pathak2206, @gupta_abhinav_, and team!

[Skild AI @SkildAI]

Announcing Series C

We’ve raised $1.4B, valuing the company at over $14B

With this capital, we will accelerate our mission to build omni-bodied intelligence 🚀

https://t.co/q0ArkRa8L8

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Big day for @TheCorgiCompany: regulatory approval to launch the first AI-native, full-stack insurance carrier for startups, plus $108M raised from top investors. @nico_laqua, @emily_yuan_, and Team Corgi have shown incredible tenacity and ambition since Day 1, and we’re proud to be on the journey with them at @SevenStars_VC.

[nico laqua @nico_laqua]

@TheCorgiCompany is coming out of stealth with $108M raised to build the future of financial infrastructure.

A lot of the GDP flows through highly regulated financial entities that haven't been meaningfully changed in decades.

To fix this, we're starting in insurance.

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

What a way to start 2026. Congratulations to @MattPavelle, Dr. Oskowitz, and the @Doctronic team on the partnership!

[Matt Pavelle 🇺🇸 @mattpavelle]

Not SciFi anymore. @Doctronic is now the first AI in America (the world?) legally authorized to practice medicine.

We're live in Utah, renewing prescriptions with no doctor required.

@politico : https://t.co/bJ5CsmqBXf

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Congrats to @bonatsos on an epic run. Niko has had a profound impact on my career, and I know hundreds (if not thousands) of founders and VCs feel the same from his mentorship. Thankful he’s encouraged me to dream bigger, from starting Seven Stars to being the best partner I can be to founders. Excited for what’s next!

[Niko Bonatsos @bonatsos]

After 15 wonderful years @generalcatalyst I am moving on to new adventures. The best days for GC are ahead! Super grateful to every single one of my teammates that I had the fortune to work with over the years. I learned a lot. Very thankful to our limited partners too for their long-term support. Equally importantly, it's been the privilege of a lifetime to work with so many inspiring tech startup founders from the very early days.

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

@jackie_bona @Valora @stripe Big congratulations @jackie_bona and @valora team!

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

Excited to back @RichardYWang and Team @VoyaEnergy alongside Sean Liu @foundersfund, @MattMulvey17 @scootermontana @Liquid2V, @mikesholiu @svangel! They’re developing metal fuels and a new energy generation approach to accelerate time to power. Learn more here: https://t.co/T942fGesgD

[Voya Energy @VoyaEnergy]

Introducing Voya Energy: Unleashing the Power of Metal Fuels

Today, we’re proud to announce the launch of Voya Energy - a company on a mission to unleash the power of metal fuels to rapidly deliver reliable, clean, affordable electricity anywhere on Earth.

Voya was created through a collaboration between renowned investor Energy Impact Partners and our highly-experienced founders - Richard Wang, Matt Horton, and Steven Kaye, who came together to pursue a world-changing idea - that humanity’s universal need for distributed energy will drive the creation of a new generation of high-density, carbon-free fuels, capable of being stored for decades and readily shipped across the globe.

Our breakthrough technology allows us to convert abundant recycled metals into a powerful, safe, durable fuel. To deliver on the promise of metal fuels, we are creating a foundational new category of energy generation devices, delivering fast access to zero-emission power - free from the limitations of the grid.

We’re also excited to announce that Voya has raised $13 million in seed funding to pursue this vision, led by founding investor @EnergyImpact_ with participation from @foundersfund, IQT, @8090industries, @overmatchvc, @trustven, @SevenStars_VC, @Liquid2V, @svangel, and individual investors @BrianJanous, @SheldonKimber, and @reinpk.

Based in Hayward, CA, we are now assembling a dynamic team of tenacious researchers, battle-tested operators and world-class investors to deliver on Voya’s ambitious mission.

Join us in fueling our electric future.

#MetalFuels #CleanEnergy #Innovation #SpeedToPower #VoyaEnergy

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

@divyahansg @nilamg Big congrats @divyahansg and Beacon team!

[Los Angeles Dodgers @Dodgers]

THE LOS ANGELES DODGERS ARE BACK-TO-BACK WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS!

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

@ArashMarkazi 2018 WS Game 3?

[Steven Lee @stevenl]

AI is rewriting how businesses understand people, and @trydialogueai is turning research into an instant superpower for every team. Excited to partner with @lobenja, @justangmustang, and @hubertpchen alongside my good friends @f_fatemi21 @lightspeedvp, @eddiekoai, and @patrickmandia!

[Dialogue AI @trydialogueai]

Dialogue is officially launching and announcing our $6M seed round!

We’re building a better way for anyone to truly listen to their customers.

🎥👇

[Reflection @reflection_ai]

Today we're sharing the next phase of Reflection.

We're building frontier open intelligence accessible to all.

We've assembled an extraordinary AI team, built a frontier LLM training stack, and raised $2 billion.

Why Open Intelligence Matters

Technological and scientific progress is driven by values of openness and collaboration.

The internet, Linux, and the protocols and standards that underpin modern computing are all open. This isn't a coincidence. Open software is what gets forked, customized, and embedded into systems worldwide. It's what universities teach, what startups build on, what enterprises deploy.

Open science enables others to learn from the results, be inspired by them, interrogate them, and build upon them in order to push the frontier of human knowledge and scientific advancement. AI got to where it is today through scaling ideas (e.g. self-attention, next token prediction, reinforcement learning) that were shared and published openly.

Now AI is becoming the technology layer that everything else runs on top of. The systems that accelerate scientific research, enhance education, optimize energy usage, supercharge medical diagnoses, and run supply chains will all be built on AI infrastructure.

But the frontier is currently concentrated in closed labs. If this continues, a handful of entities will control the capital, compute, and talent required to build AI, creating a runaway dynamic that locks everyone else out. There's a narrow window to change this trajectory. We need to build open models so capable that they become the obvious choice for users and developers worldwide, ensuring the foundation of intelligence remains open and accessible rather than controlled by a few.

What We've Built

Over the last year, we've been preparing for this mission.

We’ve assembled a team who have pioneered breakthroughs including PaLM, Gemini, AlphaGo, AlphaCode, AlphaProof, and contributed to ChatGPT and Character AI, among many others.

We built something once thought possible only inside the world’s top labs: a large-scale LLM and reinforcement learning platform capable of training massive Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) models at frontier scale. We saw the effectiveness of our approach first-hand when we applied it to the critical domain of autonomous coding. With this milestone unlocked, we're now bringing these methods to general agentic reasoning.

We've raised significant capital and identified a scalable commercial model that aligns with our open intelligence strategy, ensuring we can continue building and releasing frontier models sustainably. We are now scaling up to build open models that bring together large-scale pretraining and advanced reinforcement learning from the ground up.

Safety and Responsibility

Open intelligence also changes how we think about safety. It enables the broader community to participate in safety research and discourse, rather than leaving critical decisions to a few closed labs. Transparency allows independent researchers to identify risks, develop mitigations, and hold systems accountable in ways that closed development cannot.

But openness also requires confronting the challenges of capable models being widely accessible. We're investing in evaluations to assess capabilities and risks before release, security research to protect against misuse, and responsible deployment standards. We believe the answer to AI safety is not “security through obscurity” but rigorous science conducted in the open, where the global research community can contribute to solutions rather than a handful of companies making decisions behind closed doors.

Join Us

There is a window of opportunity today to build frontier open intelligence, but it is closing and this may be the last. If this mission resonates, join us.