Operators who understand the stack.

Michelle founded NYAD AI Capital in 2021 from a thesis built over eight years as an applied ML engineer and product lead at a top-tier search-and-ranking company. She holds an MS in Computer Science from Stanford with a focus in NLP.

Before founding NYAD, she led a 40-person ML organization shipping production models at scale — experience that sharpened her view on what makes AI infrastructure genuinely durable versus what looks like infrastructure but is actually a feature. She joined a Bay Area early-stage fund in 2018 as a Principal, spending three years investing in ML infrastructure before launching NYAD.

At NYAD, Michelle leads investment thesis development, fund operations, and technical diligence on application-layer and framework companies.

Arjun holds a PhD in Computer Science from UC Berkeley, specializing in systems and distributed computing. He spent eight years as a staff engineer at two large search-and-recommendation companies, building distributed systems at the scale where infrastructure decisions compound.

He joined NYAD in 2022 to lead diligence on infrastructure, model-serving, and inference-compute companies — the investment areas where his systems background provides a technical edge most generalist investors don't have.

At NYAD, Arjun leads diligence on infrastructure-layer companies and provides hands-on technical support to portfolio companies scaling distributed systems.

Kelsey was previously a product lead at a generative-design startup that was acquired in 2021 — giving her a founder's perspective on what it means to build AI-native products and what infrastructure actually matters for teams shipping to customers. She holds an MBA from Berkeley Haas.

She joined NYAD in 2023 to lead the firm's application-layer thesis and post-investment GTM support — the interface between infrastructure capability and product reality.

At NYAD, Kelsey works with portfolio companies on go-to-market strategy, distribution, and enterprise positioning, particularly for infrastructure companies crossing from developer adoption to enterprise sales.