Ulu Ventures

Ulu Ventures started in 2008, when Miriam Rivera and Clint Korver left their day jobs to build a venture firm in Palo Alto and named it after the Hawaiian word for breadfruit, which also carries the sense of to grow. Miriam had been a vice president and deputy general counsel at Google, Clint a Stanford PhD in decision analysis, and their shared frustration was simple: most venture decisions are soaked in gut feel and cognitive bias. So they built Ulu around a data-driven, rules-based decision model that scores the risk and reward of a deal and quietly strips the bias back out.

Ulu Ventures invests at the seed stage, the very first institutional cheque a startup takes, across enterprise software, fintech, consumer, health and sustainability, and it backs an unusually diverse set of founders on the explicit thesis that diversity is profitable. That model has pulled in serious institutional money: in February 2025 Ulu closed its fourth fund at 208 million dollars, roughly doubling its assets under management, or AUM, to more than 400 million, with LPs (the pension funds and foundations that supply a fund its capital) including the MacArthur and Ford foundations, and ten companies in the portfolio have since grown into billion-dollar unicorns.

Ulu Ventures shows up in my Leviathan database for one reason, and it is a company called Irrigreen. Irrigreen makes what it calls a digital sprinkler: a single robotic nozzle that maps the exact shape of a lawn and waters only what is actually there, which the company says cuts outdoor water use by roughly half. That is Ulu's one water holding, backed across two funding rounds, and it is the sort of water-efficiency bet a generalist fund reaches for rather than a standing thesis, which is why (don't) Waste Water rates Ulu's water commitment Occasional.

Ulu Ventures is a generalist, so whether it writes more water cheques depends less on a water mandate than on whether the next Irrigreen clears its bias-scored model on the numbers. For a newcomer scanning water investors, that is the honest read: Ulu is a serious seed-stage firm with one foot lightly in water, worth knowing for Irrigreen and for its diversity-driven track record, and not a dedicated water fund.