Bessemer Venture Partners promotes Janelle Teng to partner

Building conviction in technically complex startups requires the courage to see beyond prevailing practices and embrace new paradigms. For Janelle Teng, Bessemer's newest partner, the opportunity to work with research-driven founders who challenge established approaches is what drives her passion for investing.

"Working at the intersection of research and commercialization is what initially drew me to investing," says Janelle. "We're in a unique moment where the pace of technical innovation, particularly in AI, is accelerating exponentially. What's different now is how quickly groundbreaking research is being translated into real-world applications. The founders leading this charge often come directly from research backgrounds, and they bring both deep technical expertise and a vision for how their work can transform industries."

Today, Janelle serves as a board director or observer for Claroty, Coactive AI, Moonvalley, Render, TurbineOne, and Virtru. As a partner based in Bessemer's Silicon Valley offices, she primarily invests in early-stage AI/ML infrastructure, defense tech, data infrastructure, and developer platforms.

Building bridges between research and industry 

A point of pride in Janelle's Bessemer career is championing founders who are reimagining how breakthrough research enters the market. Throughout her career at Bessemer, Janelle has supported technical founders on incorporating product-led growth (PLG) sales motions into their go-to-market strategies, from the earliest stages to enterprise-scale and beyond. 

"The landscape for technical founders has evolved dramatically," she says. "We're seeing a new generation of entrepreneurs emerging directly from research labs and pioneering roles at organizations like DeepMind and Stanford. At the same time, institutions like the Department of Defense have become increasingly open to partnering with startups, creating unprecedented opportunities for technologists to deploy their applications at scale."

Janelle has played a leading role in shaping several of Bessemer's forward-looking frameworks for evaluating frontier technology, including the firm's AI infrastructure and defense tech roadmaps. She’s also a co-author of Bessemer’s annual State of the Cloud report and regularly shares industry insights in her newsletter NextBigTeng, through which she’s built a global community of technical AI entrepreneurs thousands strong. Janelle also helps drive the firm’s relationships with cloud providers and AI model developers, and hosts forums connecting researchers and entrepreneurs.

"The most exciting founders are those who use their own research and experimentation to question established industry protocols," explains Janelle. "Whether it's a former Stripe engineer reimagining data infrastructure at Render, or a Navy veteran applying ML to national security challenges at TurbineOne, I'm drawn to teams who can translate technical rigor into pioneering problem-solving."