Daniel Karp on Joining Cota Capital and the Opportunities Ahead

As an investor, my goal has always been to work with talented teams on tackling challenging technology problems during important market transitions. With every major technology shift, there’s been a fundamental change at the infrastructure layer, creating opportunities for new companies and technologies to become the incumbents of the next era. 

That’s the opportunity that excites me the most, and it’s exactly why I’ve joined Cota Capital at this moment in time.

I believe we’re in the middle of the biggest, most consequential technology transition in history. Yes, platform players like Anthropic and OpenAI are the ones dominating the headlines right now. But some of the more fascinating changes are happening one layer beneath them. Infrastructure is being reimagined to support these platforms and their growing ecosystem of agent-native applications. Those are the kinds of opportunities that align with Cota’s investment focus.

Personally, I gravitate toward technical founders. That’s always been true of how I invest, and it’s a big part of why joining Cota made sense. Cota has always had a deep focus on technology companies across areas such as enterprise AI infrastructure, physical AI, vertical AI, DevOps, and cybersecurity. I’ve partnered with Cota on past investments, and through that experience it, became apparent to me that my thinking and interests are closely aligned with the firm and its approach.

In my conversations with entrepreneurs over the years, they’ve told me time and again what they value most from a venture investor. It’s not just capital. The best entrepreneurs are often looking for operational advice, a counterpart for strategic brainstorming, and hands-on tactics for actual company-building. Equally as important, they’re looking for empathy and the ability to have an honest dialogue about their markets, including both the opportunities and the challenges they face. I believe providing this perspective requires investors to immerse themselves and develop a deep understanding of the markets in which their portfolio companies compete. 

Enterprise infrastructure technology is undergoing a transformative shift, with companies big and small adapting to new technologies and business models. I’m excited by the opportunity to partner with founders working through those changes and building what comes next. 

What drives my perspective

I’ve spent the bulk of my career intimately involved with deep tech endeavors. Most recently, at Cervin Ventures, I focused on investments across enterprise infrastructure, including cloud-native infrastructure, DevOps, ITOps, developer tools, cybersecurity, networking, data management, operations, and observability. 

Before that, I led investments and acquisitions across several areas at Cisco, including networking, cloud, and data center technologies. I also spent several years at Microsoft, where I worked in strategy, business development, and product management, including with the Azure team and later with the company’s internal incubation arm.

Taken together, these experiences have given me the opportunity to watch infrastructure transitions play out within large technology platforms, and from the venture side, working with companies developing technologies to enable those platforms. Those experiences shape the perspective I bring to Cota. As part of the team here, I’m looking forward to partnering with visionary product-focused and technical founders across the tech ecosystem.

Opportunities ahead

So where exactly do I see the opportunities ahead? One area I expect to focus on is the agentic refactoring of infrastructure products and services. 

Security is one example. Traditional network traffic used to move in a relatively predictable north-south direction, and its patterns were also largely human-induced. Now, it moves in every direction, all at once, with traffic generated by constant communication between humans and agents. This, to me, makes context, enforcing dynamic policies, and identity increasingly important components of security architecture.

Organizations are managing orders of magnitude more identities, primarily thanks to the sheer number of AI agents now operating inside them. Coupled with security-centric foundational models, one can reimagine new approaches to detection, remediation, and observability. In fact, many customers now have a real expectation that the same tools handle remediation too, not just discovery and alerting.

Compute has changed too, from CPUs to GPUs and new architectural designs. This has led to a rethinking of the infrastructure architecture across all building blocks – from network, storage, and memory, all the way to data management. In the past, data just needed to live close to the compute, via simple coupling and proximity. Now it’s far more complex than that, as the compute includes disparate data sources. And that complexity impacts everything else down the line, whether it’s chips, hardware, or any of the other underlying components that make a platform work.

Labor too is being disrupted, which means many vendors may become a combination of product and services, not just a product vendor in and of itself. With AI and fast deployment of agents, vendors can now extend traditional product approaches. That lets them chip away at much of the value historically provided by services and labor, delivering outcome-based services instead. I believe the next generation of deep tech companies will be designed, packaged, and priced as systems of outcomes.

These are among the areas where I plan to focus my time at Cota.

The right fit

The chance to join a specialist firm like Cota was something I jumped at. For one thing, the team shares a strong interest in the types of technology and founders I have focused on throughout my career. But beyond that, Cota brings operating experience to its work with portfolio companies, which is why I’m so confident that this is the right place to invest and help build and support the next generation of companies.