ABOUT US

DARREN LICCARDO

Darren has spent the majority of his career as an engineering executive working in the aerospace and automotive industries with a focus on autonomous systems.

Prior to co-founding Catapult Ventures, Darren served as VP of engineering at DJI, where he established its Silicon Valley office focused on advanced R&D and business development in emerging industrial markets. Before joining DJI, Darren was the founding Director of Tesla’s Autopilot engineering group where he built the team and technology that shipped Tesla’s first autopilot system.

Earlier in his career, Darren led BMW’s North American autonomous driving research efforts at the BMW Technology Office. He was also responsible for scouting new technology in support of BMW’s first internal venture fund. Prior to that, Darren worked as Director of Inertial Systems for Crossbow Technology, a startup that developed the first FAA-certified aircraft navigation system using commercial MEMS solid-state sensors. Darren has also been an active angel investor and advisor for early stage companies including Starsky Robotics, Swift Navigation, Baraja, Auro Robotics, Deepscale, Polysync, and RightHook.

Darren holds numerous patents covering a range of sensing, perception, and state estimation technologies for robotic systems. Darren is a Silicon Valley native with B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley, where he did research on UAV sensing and control systems. Darren’s hobbies include flying manned and unmanned aircraft, auto racing, drumming, camping, and water skiing.

ROUZ JAZAYERI

When I was six years old, my mom dragged me to her barber shop in La Salle, CO every morning that summer to shine shoes. I made $2/pair and earned about $350 (or roughly $850 in today’s money) which was a crazy amount of money for a six year old. More importantly, for the first time in my life, I learned the meaning of working for a dollar (or two). I carried that mentality with me in school, on the tennis court, and throughout my career. Not surprisingly, those are some of the most important attributes I look for in founders…grit, scrapiness, and willingness to get their hands dirty, just like I did shining shoes as a six year old.

At Catapult, we have successfully backed the next wave of scrappy and practical deep-tech founders while quickly building one of the world’s best seed stage deep tech funds, thanks to early exits from Oculii, XNOR.ai, Left Hand Robotics, FlightWave, and Engine ML.

Before Catapult, I had the opportunity to learn from some incredible investors at Kleiner Perkins (John Doerr, Wen Hsieh) and to work with amazing founders from Quantumscape, DJI, Ring, iControl, and MyFitnessPal.

Earlier in my career, I worked on some really cool products, like Intel’s first 45nm microprocessor and then, while still at Intel, the first MacBook Air (and first laptop) to exceed 12 hours of battery life. I studied EE at Purdue where I met some great people (including my wife!). Outside of work, I enjoy playing tennis, watching football, and supporting my three kids along their education, sports, and shoe-shining equivalent journies.

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