Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, where he's spent over a decade helping entrepreneurs build category-defining companies. He invests across three themes at the frontier of enterprise AI: AI-native services (Mechanical Orchard, Strala, Hanover Park), agentic software (Unify, Ironclad, Logik.ai, Rowspace), and physical world AI (Bedrock Robotics, DroneDeploy).

Jake has been obsessed with AI-native services since before the category had a name. In April 2024, he published "The Death of Deloitte," an essay arguing that AI would fundamentally reshape professional services, which promptly earned him a cease and desist from Deloitte (a sign he was onto something). Undeterred, he's since become a serious student of how these businesses are actually built, authoring the AI-Native Services Playbook to help founders navigate the category. His conviction that AI would reshape how we work dates back even further, to 2016, when he co-authored Emergence's thesis on AI Coaching Networks.

Entrepreneurship runs in Jake's blood. Growing up in Austin, Texas, with serial co-founder parents, he saw firsthand the courage and persistence it takes to create something new. That foundation fueled a career defined by curiosity and impact: launching solar projects across emerging markets, honing framework creation skills in management consulting, and cutting his teeth in venture at Kleiner Perkins before joining Emergence.

Jake holds a BA from Yale and an MS in Environment and Resources and MBA from Stanford, where he was an Arjay Miller Scholar. As a singer and mediocre guitar player, he's always looking for people to jam with. But his true north star is helping build enduring companies that he and his wife Dannie Herzberg would be proud for their daughters Sadie, Billie, and Lilah to work at some day.

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