Timothy Chen

Timothy Chen is the Managing Partner at Essence VC, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Seattle, Washington. A computer science graduate of the University of Washington, he previously worked as an infrastructure engineer at Microsoft and VMware before founding Hyperpilot, an artificial intelligence operations startup acquired by Cloudera. At Essence VC, Chen recently raised $41 million for the firm's fourth fund, which plans to back approximately 40 early-stage infrastructure startups. His investment portfolio has generated a dozen acquisitions to date, highlighted by the $2.2 billion sale of Tabular to Databricks in 2024. The firm's limited partners include notable industry figures such as Andreessen Horowitz's Martin Casado and Cendana Capital's Michael Kim. Chen currently focuses his investments on identifying highly technical founders who possess high intensity and learning flexibility to build foundational enterprise infrastructure.