Winter Mead is the Founder and Managing Member of Coolwater Capital, an investment firm backing emerging venture managers and early-stage technology companies. Coolwater has made over 40 fund investments and 40 direct investments, helped launch more than 300 emerging managers, and built a global network spanning venture funds, founders, governments, corporations, and institutional investors.
He is also the co-founder of Signal Fund Services, author of two books on venture capital and entrepreneurship, and a former institutional investor at Hall Capital Partners and Sapphire Ventures. Winter holds degrees from Harvard University and the University of Oxford and has taught at Stanford Graduate School of Business and UC Berkeley.

Inspired by Knight Rider and Star Trek, Shahin grew up with a passion to endow superpowers to humanity through feats of engineering. He learned BASIC on an IBM PC XT clone he built at his aunt’s computer store and dialed into Bulletin Board Systems in the 4th grade. A few years later, he was fixing an Alfa Romeo at his uncle’s repair shop. He aspired to design microchips, software, and integrated systems that could one day rival K.I.T.T. or even power warp drives to carry humanity to the far corners of the galaxy.

He is a generalist at Lux, which has $7 billion under management, and has been first investors in category-defining companies across AI, automation, biotech, compute, defense, energy, infrastructure, robotics, and beyond — including Anduril, Applied Intuition, Auris, Chronosphere, Cognition, Eikon, Hugging Face, Impulse Space, Physical Intelligence, Runway, Sakana, and Together. Lux has created and co-founded more than 20 de novo companies through Lux Labs, and multiple Lux investments have become lasting publicly traded companies and major divisions acquired by Amazon, Cisco, Databricks, J&J, Meta, Palo Alto Networks, and more.

For more than two decades, Shahin has partnered with founders building frontier technologies, guided by deep respect for the entrepreneur and the company-building journey. After working at several software startups, he founded his first company in 2004 based on his PhD research designing chips, systems, and software to capture and interpret brain signals. In 2006, he joined Lux at the invitation of its founding team and has since cofounded and led investments in companies spanning AI, semiconductors, autonomy, and aerospace — from early conviction to enduring scale. These include companies that have become publicly traded (NYSE: AEVA; NYSE: PL) and those acquired by Intel (Nervana), Amazon (Zoox), Silicon Labs (Silicon Clocks), and Lattice Semiconductor (SiBeam). An engineer at heart, Shahin works alongside founders as a long-term partner, connecting them with the resources, talent, and relationships towards building generational companies. Shahin has two young daughters and enjoys flying small aircraft.

Ben serves as Managing Partner of NextGen Venture Partners, opening up the firm’s west coast office in San Francisco. He leads investing of the Venture Capital fund focusing on early stage technology investments. Prior to joining the firm, Ben was a Partner at Bay Area-based Illuminate Ventures, where he invested in early stage enterprise SaaS companies. He began his career at IBM as a data scientist before moving into executive roles in the engineering and sales groups.

Shaun is the Founder and General Partner at 224 Ventures, an AI-Native early-stage fund with Yann LeCun and Oriol Vinyals as Frontier AI Partners. We’ve invested in companies including 1x, Datalogy, and Perplexity.