Zavain invests at the intersection and union of cutting-edge biotech and software. Zavain was previously a General Partner at Lux Capital where he led investments in companies including Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), which uses automation and deep learning to develop novel therapeutics; Enveda Biosciences, which applies cutting edge machine learning to next generation metabolomics to probe our planet’s dark chemical space for new medicines, Runway, which is putting machine learning tools into the hands of creators; Hugging Face, an open-source company democratizing Natural Language Processing; and Thrive Earlier Detection, an early cancer detection company acquired by Exact Sciences for 2.15 billion in 2020.
Previously Zavain was an investor at Eric Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors. Prior to VC, Zavain was a founder and computer scientist. At Discovery Engine (acquired by Twitter) he engineered machine learning and AI systems across a proprietary distributed computing framework to build web-scale ranking algorithms.
Zavain holds a BS in symbolic systems and an MS in computer science from Stanford where he was a researcher at the Stanford AI Lab. He has been a Lecturer at Stanford having taught seminars in Cryptocurrencies, Artificial Intelligence and Philosophy, and Venture Capital. Zavain is a first-generation immigrant from Kashmir.
