Jeff Herbst
Managing Partner at GFT Ventures
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
Founding Managing Partner
2021 - Current
Jeff Herbst is Co-Founding Managing Partner of GFT Ventures. He brings three decades of venture capital, operational, business development and M&A experience. Prior to launching GFT, he spent 20 years as NVIDIA's Vice President of Business Development where he built an ecosystem of accelerated computing applications spanning the domains of AI, Data Science, Autonomous Machines, and Graphics and Visualization. During his tenure at Nvidia, Jeff created the Nvidia GPU Ventures program, overseeing more than 40 global investments and 20 acquisitions valued over $8B. He also led the Nvidia Inception global startup accelerator comprised of more than 8,000 AI, Data Science and High Performance computing companies. Prior to joining Nvidia, Jeff ran the Business Development function at the Altavista search engine, and was a Partner at the Wilson Sonsini law firm in Palo Alto. He holds a JD from Stanford University and a BS with Honors in Computer Science and Economics from Brown University.
GFT Ventures is an early-stage frontier technology-focused VC firm investing primarily in the US and Israel.
Global CEO Advisory Board
2024
Board Member
2023
Qortex is an intelligent video analytics company that helps brands distribute video content for the web, CTV, and in-game.
Raised $10,550,000.00 from Silicon Road Ventures, GFT Ventures and Boro Capital.
Board Member
2022
Switchboard Software is an It firm that provides data engineering automation services to turn disparate data into a single source of truth.
Raised $11,900,000.00 from GFT Ventures and Quest Venture Partners.
Board Advisor
2022
TigerGraph supports advanced analytics and machine learning platforms through its distributed native graph database.
Raised $171,846,262.00 from Victor Koch and Tiger Global Management.
Board Member
2022
MicroVision designs and develops laser retina scan personal displays for electronic and computing products.
Raised $371,740,000.00 from High Trail Capital.
Board Member
2022
Board Member
2021
Mperativ design and develop marketing software solutions with a focus to increase the revenue of organizations via the platform.
Raised $5,000,000.00 from GFT Ventures, Heroic Ventures and WestWave Capital.
Senior Advisor/Board Observer
2020
Artisight is an IoT sensor network for healthcare to provide virtual care, quality improvement, and care coordination solutions.
Raised $57,000,000.00 from NVIDIA.
Vice President of Business Development and Head of Nvidia Inception GPU Ventures
2001 - 2021
Served as senior executive, and member of the executive staff, in charge of strategic business development function (i.e M&A, partnerships, strategic business relationships) and venture investments for Nvidia (the world leader in AI and visual computing with revenues now in excess of $60B/year). Responsibilities included overall ecosystem development spanning the domains of AI, Data Science, Autonomous Machines, Graphics and Visualization. During 20-year tenure at the company, created the Nvidia ventures and acquisitions programs, overseeing more than 40 global investments and 20 acquisitions valued over $8B USD. Also led the Nvidia Inception global startup accelerator, now comprised of more than 10,000 AI, Data Science and High Performance Computing companies.
NVIDIA is a computing platform company operating at the intersection of graphics, HPC, and AI.
Raised $4,095,000,000.00 from ARPA-E and DARPA.