Pete Sonsini

Pete Sonsini is an American venture capitalist focused on early-stage enterprise software, infrastructure and AI. He spent nearly two decades at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), becoming a general partner and co-leading the firm's enterprise-software practice, where he built a reputation for backing deeply technical founders at the earliest stages.

At NEA he led or seeded early investments in companies including Databricks — where he joined the board in 2014 — Anyscale, Instabase, Upstart and Perplexity. In 2024 he co-founded Laude Ventures with Databricks and Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski; the firm backs research-rooted technical founders at the earliest stages and is paired with the nonprofit Laude Institute, which counts dozens of leading computer scientists among its supporters. Laude's first fund is built around turning frontier academic research into companies, with leading computer scientists as limited partners.

Through both Laude and his NEA portfolio, Sonsini is documented as an early backer of Perplexity, and Dealroom tracks his investments across Databricks, Anyscale and Instabase. He continues to sit on the boards of several category-defining data and AI-infrastructure companies, and is among the more prominent enterprise investors of his generation. His long track record across Databricks and the broader data-infrastructure wave has made him a recognised name among enterprise and AI founders.