Entrepreneur in Residence
Vanessa is an Entrepreneur in Residence at Craft, with expertise in AI Copilots and AI Infrastructure. Vanessa started her career working in AI research and earned publications at top AI conferences like NeurIPS and ACL. She then worked as an AI engineer at Meta and an AI product manager at Apple, where she shipped products contributing to 8-figure ARR. Afterwards, she joined an AI Infrastructure startup OctoML as the first Product IC. At OctoML, she founded a serverless AI compute platform with best-in-class reliability, scalability, and price-performance. She led the team in scaling the platform from 0 to 7-figure ARR within 6 months. Most recently, she served as Interim Head of Product and Advisor at OrcaDB, where she pivoted the company’s product strategy from being a commodity vector DB solution to solving AI safety, leading to a successful Seed round. Vanessa grew up playing golf competitively and was the first in Yale history to earn a Bachelors and Masters in Statistics as well as a Bachelors in Computer Science within four years.