Before the models,
the machinery.

Flintrock Capital backs the foundational data infrastructure and ML tooling that the AI application layer runs on. Seed-stage, Seattle.

Why infrastructure

Every AI application — from a customer-service bot to a drug-discovery model — depends on a stack that begins below the model. A vector database decides what context the model sees. A feature store decides what signals the model receives. An orchestration layer decides when and how pipelines run. A model-serving framework decides how predictions reach production. Flintrock invests at the bottom of this stack, where durable value compounds.

Read the full thesis
Portfolio

Eight foundational bets.

Each company in the Flintrock portfolio occupies a distinct layer of the AI application stack.

DuckDB Labs
In-Process OLAP
Qdrant
Vector Search
BentoML
Model Serving
Weaviate
AI-Native Vector DB
Prefect
Workflow Orchestration
Grafbase
GraphQL Gateway
Chalk
Feature Store
Cocoindex
Incremental Indexing
The team

Operators who built what was missing.

J
James Thornton
Managing Partner

9 years, hyperscale distributed query & data pipeline systems. Founded Flintrock in 2021.

Y
Yuki Nakashima
Partner

ML platform lead at scale, then Head of Eng at data observability startup. Joined Flintrock at inception.

Full bios