Walden Catalyst: the deep-tech fund led by Lip-Bu Tan and Young Sohn, now hunting in India

When the two people running one of Silicon Valley's most storied deep-tech funds are the CEO of Intel and the former corporate president of Samsung, founders building at the bleeding edge should pay attention. Walden Catalyst Ventures, co-founded by Lip-Bu Tan and Young Sohn, is an early-stage fund devoted to deep tech - and it is now actively hunting in India.

Investment thesis

The firm's stated focus is data, deep tech, AI, cloud, fintech and digital biology - with an explicit filter for "early stage deep-tech where there's a breakthrough in science or technology" and data/AI infrastructure startups, in Partner Shankar Chandran's words. It invests across the US, Europe and Israel, bringing the founders' combined $5.7 billion of career capital-raising experience and global reach to early-stage companies. India is on the map: Chandran, an Indian-origin partner (IIT BHU, Wharton MBA, ex-head of the Samsung Catalyst Fund), sits on the board of its first verified Indian bet.

Funds, stages and cheque sizes

Walden Catalyst Ventures closed its inaugural fund in November 2021 at over $550 million, well above its original $400 million target, with institutional LPs and CEOs of major tech corporations participating. The firm describes itself as early-stage; it has not publicly stated cheque sizes, and no Fund II announcement has been found as of this writing. Note: an older $100 million India semiconductor fund belongs to the sister firm Walden International (founded 1987), not Walden Catalyst.

Notable portfolio

Current investments on the firm's site include Rivos - the RISC-V compute company it backed from inception and which was acquired by Meta - plus Empower Semiconductor, SambaNova Systems, AI21, Ingonyama, MindsDB, Galileo, Nace AI, Virtue AI, Opaque Systems and 3DGS. The partners' prior track record includes Zoom, IonQ, Graphcore and Nuvia. In India, the verified bet is ATI Motors (Bengaluru): Walden Catalyst co-led its $20 million Series B in January 2025 alongside NGP Capital, with True Ventures, Exfinity, Athera and Blume Ventures participating. Ati builds autonomous mobile robots - the Sherpa Tug - for factories, serving TVS Motor and Hyundai across the US, India and Southeast Asia.

People

Founding Managing Partners: Lip-Bu Tan (founded Walden International in 1987; ran Cadence Design Systems 2009-2021; per the firm's site, now CEO of Intel) and Young Sohn (ex-Samsung corporate president; seed investor in Zoom; co-founder of Extreme Tech Challenge). Partners include Shankar Chandran, Roni Hefetz, Francis Ho, Andrew Kau and Nicolas Autret.

Credits and perks

No accelerator, credits or perks programme is publicly stated. Extreme Tech Challenge (XTC), co-founded by Young Sohn, is a separate organisation with close ties to the firm.

How to engage

No dedicated pitch process is published. Founders can use the contact page (1 California Street, Suite 1750, San Francisco), [email protected], or partner LinkedIn profiles. Deep-tech founders with a genuine breakthrough should also watch XTC as an informal route in.