We built the systems that needed this infrastructure. Now we fund the people building it.
James spent nine years as a principal engineer at a hyperscale cloud infrastructure company, focused on distributed query systems and data pipeline architecture — building the kind of systems that Flintrock's portfolio companies now enable others to build.
He left in 2019 to advise ML-infrastructure startups, working directly with founding teams on technical architecture and go-to-market in the developer tooling space. He founded Flintrock Capital in 2021 with the conviction that the AI application layer's foundational infrastructure layer was underinvested at Seed.
James leads investment diligence on data storage, query systems, and orchestration. He sources from open-source communities, engineering blogs, and conversations with principal and staff engineers at hyperscale companies.
Yuki spent five years as a data engineer and ML platform lead at a Seattle-based e-commerce company, building the feature engineering and model deployment infrastructure that ran millions of daily recommendations. She then spent two years as Head of Engineering at a Series B data observability startup, experiencing the scaling and go-to-market side of infrastructure from the inside.
She joined Flintrock at inception in 2021 to cover the ML infrastructure portfolio: feature stores, model serving, embedding retrieval, and model observability. She evaluates investments through the lens of what a principal ML engineer wants, what an ML platform team can maintain, and what a VP of Engineering will approve.
Yuki leads diligence on BentoML, Chalk, Qdrant, Weaviate, and Cocoindex — the ML-adjacent half of the Flintrock portfolio.
Flintrock Capital manages Flintrock Fund I, a $72M seed-stage fund focused on data infrastructure and ML tooling. The firm is headquartered in Seattle, WA at 1201 Third Avenue, Suite 4400.
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