Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Siraj is a Partner on the investment team at Atomico. As a former computer scientist and co-founder/CTO of the successful Atomico investment The Climate Corporation, Siraj now continues his love for entrepreneurship “on the other side of the table” as a venture capitalist. He focuses on companies enabled by machine learning, AI and computer vision, (particularly in intelligent assistants), IoT, Agtech, and works with a number of portfolio companies.

Siraj founded The Climate Corporation in 2006, a company that pioneered the use of machine learning in helping farmers to optimize crop yield. Climate (acquired by Monsanto in 2013 and now a subsidiary) still sits at the vanguard of precision agriculture, an industry that is expected to play a key role in delivering the yield boosts needed to feed humanity in the decades ahead.

Prior to this, Siraj was an early engineering hire at Google in 2001, and one of the founding engineers for the Google Book search project. He holds an MS degree in Computer Science from Stanford University, and a BA Hons in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge, UK. Siraj speaks fluent English, advanced Urdu, and just enough German to be dangerous.

An enterprising child, Siraj taught himself to code in C at age 13, and wrote and sold his first piece of software, a database for medical research, at 15. He is a fan of functional programming languages, and still enough of a geek to spend the occasional weekend trying out new languages and frameworks.