Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, where he’s spent over a decade helping entrepreneurs build category-defining companies. From Ironclad to Guru, Assembled to Logik to Unify, Jake has spearheaded investments in a portfolio of transformative businesses that are reshaping how work gets done. He led Emergence's 2024 investment in Mechanical Orchard, leveraging AI to move mainframe workloads into the cloud and helping to pioneer the now hot “AI-enabled services” theme. 

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. This 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 has been passionate about the role AI can play in improving our working lives since 2016, when he co-authored Emergence’s thesis on AI Coaching Networks. He's a student of how iconic companies are being built using AI, authoring the AI-Enabled Services Playbook.

Jake has his BA from Yale and his 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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