Jake Saper is a General Partner at Emergence Capital, where he's spent over a decade helping entrepreneurs build category-defining companies. He led diligence on Emergence's 2014 investment in Zoom and today invests across three themes at the frontier of enterprise AI: AI-native services (Hanover Park, Prosper AI, Mechanical Orchard), agentic software (Unify, Ironclad, Logik.ai, Rowspace), and physical world AI (Bedrock Robotics, DroneDeploy). He also led Emergence's investment in OpenAI's Deployment Company, which is building the services arm to bring frontier AI into enterprises.

Jake has been backing 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 earned him a cease and desist from Deloitte and named a new category, AI-Native Services. He has since codified the category in the AI-Native Services Playbook. 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 what it takes to build something new. Before joining Emergence, he developed solar projects across emerging markets, worked in management consulting, and began his venture career at Kleiner Perkins.Jake holds a BA from Yale and an MS 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 three daughters to work at some day.

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