Yan-David Erlich

Overview

As a General Partner at B Capital, Yan-David Erlich specializes in investing in AI co-workers and the infrastructure that supports them. He is particularly interested in companies that are transitioning from chatbots to AI agents capable of owning outcomes alongside human teams. His investment approach targets applications in engineering, sales, and finance, as well as the underlying infrastructure such as memory, orchestration, and observability. He typically makes investments ranging from $5 million to $50 million, starting from the seed stage onwards. Prior to his role at B Capital, Erlich was the Chief Operating Officer and Chief Revenue Officer at Weights & Biases, an AI developer platform. Before that, he served as a General Partner at Coatue Management, where he led investments in enterprise software and crypto. He has also founded and served as CEO for multiple venture-backed companies, including Parsable, a connected worker platform, and ChoiceVendor, a B2B services marketplace acquired by LinkedIn in 2010. His career began with software engineering and product management roles at Google and Microsoft. Erlich holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Electrical & Computer Engineering from Rice University and an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. He has been featured in various media outlets, including Forbes, Fortune, and the Wall Street Journal. His investment philosophy emphasizes the importance of exceptional founders with strong founder-market fit, the uniqueness of data moats, and the depth of workflow embedding in products. He seeks to partner with companies that are indispensable to users' daily work and have clear plans for layering in defenses over time to ensure progressive defensibility.

Investment Focus

• Exceptional founders with strong founder-market fit
• Unique high-quality data with continuous feedback loops
• Products indispensable to users' daily work with deep integration
• Clear plan for layering-in defenses over time to ensure progressive defensibility

Portfolio Companies