Can AI and robotics revolutionize industrial tech?
From reshoring supply chains to automating critical industries, robotics and AI are reshaping the global economy. But how do investors navigate this fast-moving space? Lisa Chai, general partner at Interwoven Ventures, has spent decades investing in frontier technology and believes we are just at the beginning of an industrial transformation.
In this episode, Lisa joins Driving Alpha to discuss the megatrends fueling AI and robotics, including industrial automation, labor shortages, and government-backed tech initiatives. She explains how Interwoven Ventures provides pure exposure to robotics and AI—a highly specialized investment sector requiring deep domain expertise. Lisa also shares her personal journey into venture capital, insights on gender diversity in the industry, and advice for founders seeking funding in industrial tech.
Why Lisa Chai is a leader in industrial AI investing
With a background spanning public and private markets, Lisa has played a pivotal role in shaping investment strategies for AI, automation, and robotics. Her experience in technology buyouts, IPOs, and alternative asset classes gives Interwoven Ventures an edge in helping early-stage companies scale. For founders in logistics, supply chain, and industrial AI, Lisa shares why partnering with specialized investors is key to long-term success.
Transcript
Brian Smiga (00:00.919)
Lisa Chai from Interwoven. Welcome. I’m so glad to see you in our podcast, Driving Alpha.
On this podcast, we interview GPs who have a unique value proposition for how they drive out performance. I’d like to welcome Lisa Chai of Interwoven. So Lisa, let’s frame up what Interwoven does in the larger industrial tech or supply chain tech space for context.
Lisa Chai (00:39.736)
Sure, thanks for having me.
We are an early stage venture fund investing in the field of robotics and AI with an emphasis in critical industries. We invest in sectors such as manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and healthcare technology where we believe robotics and AI are making the biggest impact today and will experience a sustained period of growth. I’m a founder and general partner leading the firm’s investment activities. We invest in Seed to Series C companies.
Brian Smiga (01:14.181)
Wow. I’ve become very interested in industrial tech as has Alpha Partners. Alpha Partners is a growth fund that invests Series B and later. We work with early stage and emerging managers like Lisa to monetize their best companies when they get to mid-stage and we share the profit with them. So, it’s a privilege to have customers or friends like Lisa as our partners in the Alpha Model.
But Lisa, let’s get to you and your origin story. How did you come to this? Tell us about your origin.
Lisa Chai (01:50.51)
My journey to the VC industry is a very interesting one. I didn’t really seek out, ‘hey, I have to be a venture capitalist.’ I think it fell into my lap because of my years of experience. I had over 17 years of investment experience in both the public and private equity markets before I joined a company called Robo Global in 2018. This is where I helped launch an AI investment strategy. And we spun this venture fund out about a year ago. How I met Robo Global was one of my contacts on Wall Street, who told me about this opportunity where they were looking for someone who understood investing in frontier technologies.
Someone with a good understanding of industrial automation to tie that all together and help launch several new strategies.
At the time, I had never heard of the company before. And I quickly did some research and found out that it was the world’s first robotic focused strategy founded by technologists. That was something I’d never heard of on Wall Street before. I was very humbled and honored to join this prestigious group. I met the team. It was comprised of nine robotic scientists from all over the world and about 10 investment professionals.
Since I joined the company, I helped their investment efforts in both public equities and private investments, and launching AI and healthcare tech strategies. So that’s been instrumental in forming Interwoven Ventures and our investment thesis, which is a continuation of what we started at Robo Global. The company got sold to a large Canadian company, and I used that opportunity to spin out the fund.
Lisa Chai (03:49.92)
This is why myself and a couple of investment partners, we’re now launching our next fund too, that’s coming up shortly. We’re sticking with the same knitting: finding really innovative companies with business models that we understand. And it has an industrial tech component to it because that is the legacy what we did, the robotic technologies, hardware and software combined.
Brian Smiga (04:19.865)
Likewise. At Alpha we’re in several robotics companies and they’ve been winners for us so far.
Lisa Chai (04:25.292)
Yes, you know, robotic investing really isn’t for everyone. A lot of people ask me, Brian, you know, were you always into robotics and AI? You know, as a kid, I remember being just really about technology and investing.
Brian Smiga (04:47.525)
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Chai (04:47.822)
I watched a lot of movies, when kids were watching Disney movies and teen movies, I was watching movies about stock markets, and I read dozens of books and, eventually met, you know, luminaries like Peter Lynch and Leon Cooperman, George Soros, and I was really influenced by these leaders of macroeconomics and fundamental analysis and stock investing. So it’s been my dream.
Brian Smiga (05:14.031)
Mm-hmm.
Lisa Chai (05:17.776)
It helped that I was good at math, And a bit of a nerd and geek…
Brian Smiga (05:25.541)
Okay, so at what age does this start? We all want to hear about little Lisa reading about macroeconomics, investing, and maybe a little bit of robotics as a kid.
Lisa Chai (05:37.846)
Yeah, I would say like, you know, fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade.
Brian Smiga (05:42.147)
Okay, well, that’s amazing. Anything you start in middle school, you get really good at because it’s like your neuroplasticity is making you an expert early on. And I think that’s phenomenal. I haven’t heard that before.
Lisa Chai (05:57.976)
I remember watchingthe movie Wall Street…
Lisa Chai (06:05.486)
And as I did all that, a lot of kids were trying to figure out what they want to be in life, what do they want to do? People ask that. Your grandparents ask you, what do you want to do when you grow up? I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted to work in the equity markets. And I didn’t care if was private or public, but I just wanted to do that.
Brian Smiga (06:22.187)
Awesome. Well you’ve got your dream come true, you’re the general partner at your own hundred million dollar fund, that’s amazing. But all along your journey, it was a man’s world for the most part and remains so. There’s only 20 % of decision makers that are women in venture capital. It’s similar in private equity, probably similar in asset management, the public markets and other asset classes. But let’s just focus on venture and we’ll get into that around industrial tech. How was it coming up through the ranks? Like from college forward, being excellent in a man’s world.
Lisa Chai (07:07.31)
You know, I would say I never really knew that I was a female, and it was hard for me to navigate. Yeah, at some throughout my career, I did see that there was a difference in salaries between myself and my male colleagues.
Brian Smiga (07:14.787)
You’re gender blind.
Brian Smiga (07:26.381)
And so, they were not gender blind.
Lisa Chai (07:28.832)
So you learn quite a bit, I am used to it, I started off in high school, I continued my search for technology and mastering the Excel spreadsheet. You know, I didn’t go to the prom. I had no interest going to prom. I did it all. I played video games with my male brothers and cousins. So throughout college, I was a computer programmer and I was the only female.
Brian Smiga (07:47.204)
Wow.
Lisa Chai (07:58.888)
I think I got used to that experience and then when you’re studying that computer science and finance, you’re always often the only female, and I think also sometimes you’re often a few minority members as well. I was used to it. When I worked on Wall Street,I would say it’s not even 20%. When I was started in Wall Street, we’re talking about 1 to 2% were female. You look around the room and I would often be the only female. So I became accustomed to that. When you work in the hedge fund industry, that was my first job really. I remember how special I felt.
Brian Smiga (08:27.781)
Right. Right.
Lisa Chai (08:46.894)
Then my boss came to me and said, “You know what, I don’t care if you’re purple and you’re from Mars, as long as you can make money”, you know…
Brian Smiga (08:54.043)
That’s right. We have this universal meritocracy when it comes to investing, and it’s like, do you drive alpha? That’s the theme of this Driving Alpha podcast. So, now we’re going to learn how you uniquely are going to continue to drive alpha. But before we do that, do you have any advice for women in VC being a pioneer woman, GP at interwoven?
Lisa Chai (09:02.881)
Exactly.
Brian Smiga (09:22.019)
Like famous pioneer GPs like Cindy Padnos at Illuminate, Deborah Jackson at Plum Alley, or Heather Hartnett at Human Ventures. Do have any advice?
Lisa Chai (09:29.718)
I think my advice is just to be yourself and not really use gender as a tool. I think you just go out there and be the best person you can be. And if you find bosses or colleagues or partners that don’t recognize that, that we need the best employee here, best partner, then you’re not in the right place. My secret sauce has always been, I surrounded myself with mentors and bosses that recognize the team that they’re building are world class associates, analysts, directors, partners, principals who come here and make a difference, you know? And we have a fiduciary duty to do the best we can and create alpha and really have the highest potential for capital generation for our LPs. I always try to make sure that my boss is not hiring me because I’m a female or because of other reasons, but because he or she thought I was the best I could be.
Brian Smiga (10:43.993)
Okay, so pick your partners carefully. Pick your companies and your bosses or the people you report to carefully, because there are those that are merit-oriented and gender-blind and they just want returns, they just want results. Let’s leave it there, that’s great advice. Let’s move on to how you chose industry tech and then how you plan to outperform within industry. Why should an LP pick your fund over IronSpring or Dynamo?
Lisa Chai (11:22.904)
Yeah. And I think my experience going through dot com rise crash. We went through so many different financial and banking crisis and several revolutions. I experienced the internet boom, cloud, crypto. And the reason I’m in industrial tech is that right now we’re going through this major industrial revolution 4.0 to 5.0.
Brian Smiga (11:32.634)
Right. It’s 70%, 75 % of world GDP.
Lisa Chai (11:57.07)
Exactly. And it’s hard to argue that we’re not in the AI and robotic revolution today. I could argue whether is it the first inning, second, third? Some of our interesting panels and topics have always been about different perspectives. But what you can see is that we are going through emerging major mega trends happening. The reason for Interwoven, is my years of experience across cycles: I’ve seen cable getting built out, telecom equipment, internet built out, yet this seems much bigger than what I’ve ever seen.
Brian Smiga (12:37.199)
Yeah, let’s unpack this for people as I know you can do it. First of all, observation, is it an AI and/or robotics revolution? AI gets all the press, but machines doing work for us, just like AI is going to some white collar work for us, may be under people’s radar. I see that you consider this to be all one piece. That’s very interesting. And then secondly, we’re talking about megatrends. I call these tailwinds, systemic tailwinds, right? I want to invest alongside systemic tailwinds. Let’s pick them apart. Can you explain to the audience what some of these mega trends are?
Lisa Chai (13:13.772)
Yes, think mega trends is when you’re having that big convergence, right? You’re seeing the intersection of technology, consumer and industrial automation converging. You and I could talk about is Apple a consumer company or tech company? Is Apple a retail company, supply chain company or technology company? Really depends on the investor’s perspective and the angle that you’re looking at. What you argue is the amount of GDP impact globally.
Brian Smiga (13:29.296)
Right.
Lisa Chai (13:43.668)
We’re still in the early innings of lot of these tasks getting automated because of labor shortage, demographic changes, and climate change. All could layer on different tailwinds. So I’m not looking at just one tailwind. The stock markets are looking for AI companies and industrial. It’s a lot of money flowing into many of these industries.
Brian Smiga (13:58.405)
Yeah.
Lisa Chai (14:13.572)
Retail companies, for example, want to be a tech company. Tech companies want to be retail. So we’re really seeing this massive opportunity right now where executives and board members are sitting there saying, who do we want to be in the next 10, 15 years? And where do we have to invest and spend? And you’re starting to see corporations putting together venture arms. Among companies that’s been around for a hundred years. They’ve never had venture before, right? But they are putting a venture arm together to invest, as well as R&D investment. They don’t want to miss out. And the biggest difference is that instead of the cost cutting measures of some AI and automation, the robotic capabilities could also help increase productivity. And that’s a very new thing is that productivity generation could also really help generate revenue growth. And most of these companies right now, especially the established companies that’s been around forever, they haven’t had revenue growth in a while. Now they are towards some of the hardware automation, robotic systems, and entire solution set to create more productivity. And hopefully they could create new revenues out of that.
Brian Smiga (15:30.683)
GDP has always been the outcome of productivity. And I think this is a key driver. I’m just summarizing some of the things you said. Let’s get into a couple of others that you may see. I think global competition and reshoring of manufacturing and supply chains. That’s one. Let’s talk about that one.
Lisa Chai (15:50.604)
Yes, I think the reshoring is one of the biggest developments and biggest trends. It’s not new. It’s something that I think the US has been talking about for the last 10 years. If you really dig deeper into some of the industrial tech companies, they’ve actually been shifting a lot of the manufacturing outside of China into places like Malaysia and India, right? So it’s been going on over the years.
Brian Smiga (16:19.503)
We’ve been diversifying our supply chain for a decade, But now we’re in sort of phase two of reshoring and a native supply chain.
Lisa Chai (16:30.284)
Right. And I think now there’s a lot more of support from investors as well as manufacturers to say, we really do have to do this because the world is changing, and we are having to have a hard time retaining some of the key talent in the organization. You’re seeing this accelerated process of the reshoring with government support as well.
Brian Smiga (16:56.715)
Huge government support, in fact, between the Infrastructure Act and what I think the current administration, as well as the past administration, is doing to earmark large sums of capital, like a trillion, to government-private cooperation and infrastructure, digital infrastructure, even defense and security, as well as advanced manufacturing. It’s huge. And then that becomes a tailwind for VCs because it will be major customers coupled with non-dilutive capital. So I think that government element is here to stay. Next one, tech infrastructure. Like you can’t have this without certain thresholds being met in compute, batteries and energy storage, mechanics and manufacturing itself, like supply chain, how we make these machines, data collection.
All AI and all organizations are going to thrive because they have a unique, advantage in collecting data. Well, robots collect a ton more data than people do, than a human worker does. Let’s talk about those tech requirements to drive this sea change.
Lisa Chai (18:12.812)
Yes, I think the tech requirement is important. And this is why we tap into our robotic ecosystem and community that we have helped build out.
At our company, we have six technical robotic scientists that not just help with deal sourcing, but also help our portfolio companies with different types of sensing technologies etc, that they evaluated in their academic research. We help our portfolio companies with their technical milestones. Because if you can’t reach these milestones of performance and safety, then the deployment time slows down.
Because customers are not getting the type of performance and ROI out of the solutions that they have deployed. So deployment slows down all of the industrial automation process that you and I are talking about. So the right type of technology infrastructure is at play here in terms of everything from actuators to simple automation technologies combined with very advanced sensors. And our listeners have heard a lot about Gen ai.
What is the role of a foundational model software that layers on top of the hardware to make sure that robots are able to navigate with each other and to be able to self-think without human interaction, right? So, but in the future, at least in the near to medium term, some of the infrastructure that’s getting built out right now, are robotic solutions that need human input. We’re going to see for a long period of time this human-robot interaction.
Brian Smiga (19:56.219)
Right. Just like we have AIs augmenting human decisioning, we need human robotic interaction. Interesting. Unpack that a little bit more.
Lisa Chai (20:06.7)
Some of the roles that our portfolio companies are seeking, some of the talent that we’re seeking aren’t really in AI engineering. We have lot of great AI engineers. If you could afford key people, that’s great. But the motion planning, sensing technologies, those type of skill sets are relatively new. I think that that’s something that we need to continue to build out and figure out where can we go to get some of these resources and how do we train humans to manage, the robots.
It’s really a technician that’s not doing the manual tasks that he used to do, but that person is now managing several different robotic systems to make sure it performs, and adjusts when it just stops, something gets stuck. That technician-operator skill set can be very important.
Brian Smiga (21:11.151)
That’s interesting. We think a lot about retraining the workforce for AI, but there’s the retraining a part of the workforce for working with robots. You know, we see this in two example companies in the Alpha portfolio, and I want you to trade then and tell us a little bit about a couple of yours. In ours, Shield AI is the world leader in autonomous piloting, flying vehicles in groups. And there’s definitely a significant human-robot interaction there.
But it’s really a software company, right? And all these, the greatest of these hardware companies like Apple on down to Gecko Robotics, which is another example, are software companies. Gecko Robotics has the largest fleet of climbing robotic inspection drones. So they climb on critical infrastructure in defense, oil and glass, pipeline, bridges, the built world. And a climbing robot can efficiently and safely inspect infrastructure and collect a thousand times more data. It’s a really exciting thing. Enough about our companies at Alpha. Tell us about a couple of yours that exemplify what we’ve been talking about.
Lisa Chai (22:21.198)
Yes, especially the reshoring topic that we were just talking about. If we really want food to be produced locally, and that’s going to be big problem. We have a major problem in the food industry with labor shortage. And commodity prices are going up. We have a company called Chef Robotics. It’s a food robot company that’s disrupting the food industry. They have a very efficient and low-cost solution for their customers. And we know this food space well. What they do is they don’t produce the food, but they assemble meal trays. And that’s a very big growth area right now. All of us are busy. We want frozen food that we could heat up quickly. We want something that’s really healthy.
So they work with some of the top tier companies that are putting together these meal kits. And right now, the worker turnover at these plants and in cold storage is so high. Many companies have struggled in this space to retain their employees. So, the solutions from Chef Robotics can deploy in one day.
Brian Smiga (23:18.627)
Important, yeah.
Lisa Chai (23:34.262)
So Chef Robotics has a very short ROI payback. The founder has put together a great group of AI engineers and seasoned operators to bring these products to scale. They’re located in California and they’re doing amazing. And right now, they’re capturing all this data that you were talking about. So the data that is feeding the robots and the software is integrating all this can now identify 4,000 different ingredients. Isn’t that crazy?
Brian Smiga (24:10.777)
Amazing. And I’m going to go have a meal that came in the in a minute. That’s my lunch, right? From Factor. A little pitch for Factor and ready in a minute. Thanks largely to Robotics. Now I think the important closing comments are why should founders come to Interwoven and how do they do it? We want founders to come to you that are in this space.
Lisa Chai (24:38.766)
Right. At Interwoven, we offer pure exposure to robotics and AI with really strong domain expertise in industrial automation, supply chain, and healthcare tech. So if you care about that, I think that you should definitely come to us because we are differentiated. We lean very heavily on our academic research community. And because robotic investing is not that easy. It’s very capital intensive. You must understand the asset structure. You do have to tap into some of the experts in this space. For example, a relationship with growth equity companies like Alpha, and PE firms, corporates and supply chain, network investment bankers, because at the end of the day, we have to help our portfolio companies by adding value to them through investment process of helping them through commercialization to exit. So we generally invest in early stages of growth, from early to growth, we’ve seen it all. So that’s our secret sauce that we understand.
Lisa Chai (25:45.52)
Plus our experience in the IPO markets, the M&A environments, and the majority of my investment experience in alternative asset class has been in technology buyouts and IPO markets. So I think that we are the right investors. And earlier stage, from early to growth, is where we’re seeing a ton of opportunities. Most of these companies are not available to the public. And it’s really hard to tap into these investment opportunities in later stages because it’s already being allocated.
Brian Smiga (26:14.681)
Yeah. So you have a complete life cycle ecosystem to help your companies starting with your team. And you have advisors that extend your team, right? Deep domain experts in maybe 10 areas. We spoke about that, but then all the way through to subsequent financings. That’s really exciting. So that’s the reason if you’re in AI and robotics, you should get in touch with Lisa Chai at Interwoven. How do people do that?
Lisa Chai (26:43.106)
Yes, they could find me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. Send me a message there. Also, we have a website at interwoven.vc that you could come to. Please check us out.
Brian Smiga (26:54.863)
Great, all right, well on that note, let’s close. Lisa, it’s been great spending time with you. Thank you for joining Driving Alpha and being a friend to Alpha Partners. Are you raising a new fund soon?
Lisa Chai (27:07.18)
Yes, we’re raising our fund too. We’re in the early stages. So this podcast is a perfect timing.
Brian Smiga (27:14.853)
Thank you so much, Lisa.
Lisa Chai (27:19.49)
Thanks, Brian.