Welcoming Tony Shi as Our Newest Partner

Please join us in welcoming Tony Shi (opens in new tab) to Felicis as our newest Investment Partner.

Tony joins Felicis to advance specific work we consider central to our future: building deep, long-term relationships with the researchers and student founders coming out of the world’s leading labs and major research universities.

Felicis has a long and successful history of backing researchers who turn frontier ideas into category-defining companies across every layer of AI, from foundational models, robotics, and multimodal generation to data infrastructure, developer tools, agents, evaluation, and applied AI. As the distance between academic breakthroughs and commercial applications rapidly collapses, the researchers advancing the frontier are increasingly the ones best positioned to build what comes next.

As such, we believe many consequential technology companies will emerge from university labs, built by researchers (opens in new tab) who pair intellectual rigor with the ownership, conviction, and comfort with ambiguity required to turn breakthroughs into enduring companies. Finding them means offering early exposure to entrepreneurship (opens in new tab) and being in the room years before demo day, close to the research questions themselves.

Tony is uniquely suited to grow the research community at Felicis, not only because of his unique life and career experience, but also because he deeply embodies our core values. Tony built his career in reverse: he founded and scaled a company first, then earned his college degree. Born in Shanghai and raised in Vancouver, he came to the United States at 16 and went straight to work, joining a tile business in 2008, during the collapse of the housing market and the worst year in recent memory to enter construction. Over the next decade, he helped turn the business into a leading vendor for Wayfair, Home Depot, Lowe’s, Costco, and Walmart, including spending three years in China building its manufacturing operations.

When industry veterans told him tile could never be sold online, Tony challenged the conventional wisdom and scaled e-commerce revenue 3x year over year for five consecutive years.

At 26, Tony returned for the education he had skipped: first a GED, then community college, and finally a transfer to UC Berkeley. Tony worked at Redpoint before coming to Stanford for his MBA, where he joined Dorm Room Fund and later Pear VC’s investment team, working directly with student founders.

Tony’s path reflects how we work at Felicis. He learns and adapts rapidly, seeks out the leverage point that can most change an outcome, and acts with courage before success is assured. He is relentless without losing sight of the relationships and trust that make lasting success possible. Long before anyone asked it of him, he was operating with the agency, resourcefulness, and conviction of a founder; these are the same qualities we look for in the entrepreneurial researchers and student founders we love to back.

“What a gift to be working with researchers during this generational tech shift,” Tony says. “The foreseeable future will be defined by hard problems that require deep domain expertise; I’m extremely bullish on researchers solving them. When an industry is still emerging, a student at the frontier of a field may be better positioned than a 20-year industry veteran to imagine what comes next. They have a blank canvas, and those who can imagine the big, new ideas are the ones that win.”

William Cielen, founder and CEO of Hilt, said, “Tony was one of the earliest believers in Hilt. I first met him on a call at 11:30 p.m. By 8 a.m. the next morning, he had me on a call with Pear’s managing partner, and that same day made the investment happen. But he didn't just make it happen. He showed up every week afterwards, shaped my early views on business, gave me book recommendations, and was a real partner and friend.”

We love how Shyam Pradheep, the co-founder of FinRank, described Tony: “Tony is the person I call when shit hits the fan. Yes, he’s a killer investor who cares deeply about the company, the investment, and the product. He wants to help the company reach its highest potential, make the investment as successful as it can be, and he’s always willing to get his hands dirty. But that’s not what makes him special. What makes Tony special is that I have absolute faith that, first and foremost, he’s looking out for you. With directness and empathy, he tells you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. In the world of early-stage investing, I’m not sure there’s a bigger superpower.”

Felicis has long believed that the researchers pushing the boundaries of AI are uniquely positioned to build its most transformative companies. We’ve backed more than 65 companies founded by teams with PhD/research backgrounds, including Skild AI (opens in new tab), Ricursive Intelligence (opens in new tab), Fractile (opens in new tab), Runway (opens in new tab), Datology (opens in new tab), Periodic Labs (opens in new tab), Arena (opens in new tab), Simular (opens in new tab), Weights & Biases (opens in new tab), and DeepJudge (opens in new tab). Across each of these investments, we have seen the same pattern: exceptional researchers increasingly want to bring their breakthroughs into the world themselves, and the combination of deep technical insight and founder-level ambition can produce extraordinary companies.

Tony’s story is one of continual reinvention, focused ambition, and earned trust. That makes him an exceptional fit for Felicis and for the community of researcher founders we are committed to supporting. If you’re a researcher or a student founder thinking about what comes next, Tony and all of us at Felicis would love to hear from you: tony@felicis.com.

Welcome to Felicis, Tony. We’re so glad to be building with you.