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- jessica peltz-zatulove - hannah grey ventures
jessica peltz-zatulove - hannah grey ventures
“Good VCs are true partners, not just funders.”
Connect with Jessica
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Venture capital is at a crossroads, with the "old guard" often clinging to established norms while a new generation of agile, daring investors steps forward to reshape the future. One such visionary: Jessica Peltz-Zatulove, Founding Partner at Hannah Grey Ventures.
In an industry often criticized for its slow pace and box-checking mentality, Jessica understands that real breakthroughs often come from under-the-radar VCs and emerging managers, those who go beyond just writing checks to provide genuine, hands-on support to founders.
The firm operates on a simple but radical premise: genuine partnership requires uncomfortable honesty. They've built their reputation on being the investors who will have the hard conversations with empathy, who understand that supporting founders means more than capital—it means being present during the messy, uncertain moments in a startup’s journey when conventional wisdom falls short.
This philosophy extends to how the firm thinks about opportunity itself. Rather than chase consensus or compete for obvious deals, Hannah Grey has built an Applied AI-Operating system. As a tech forward firm, they’ve embedded over 60 custom agentic workflows into their daily motion, each designed to increase their “Speed to Signal”, with agents helping them cut through the noise to reach conviction faster.
The system is grounded in their relentless obsession with customer intelligence. The infrastructure includes 24M+ synthetic enterprise buyer personas that simulate adoption curves, willingness to pay, and market pull, and 10k+ active synthetic personas that can decode market resonance, messaging most likely to resonate, ICP alignment, and more. These workflows are supported by their proprietary Foresight Engine, which analyzes over 3,000 real-time cultural signals alongside internal research, from virality and friction to emerging language patterns and unmet needs. This enables the team to identify societal shifts before they become investment trends. Select insights are published through their Cultural Vibrations platform.
They're not just asking whether a technology can work, but whether the moment is ripe for adoption, tracking how readiness evolves and identifying the precise inflection points when shifts in collective consciousness create unexpected investment opportunities.
Hannah Grey stays small by design, enabling them to stay close to founders and nimble in how they invest. Because even in an AI-driven world, the real edge comes from staying connected to the humans building it.
Meet Jessica
Q: If you could be anywhere, eating, drinking, and reading whatever you like most, where would you be and what would those things be? |  |
Key Quotes
“We empower our founders. We’re here to support them and open doors. Our goal is to be a Swiss army knife that’s a phone call away from whatever the business needs, whether it's us or someone in our network.
“Kate and I have clarity on the firm we’re building; we plan to stay disciplined with appropriately sized pre-seed and seed funds. We’ve built our entire venture careers at the early stage, because we love the 0 to 1 creative phase of a business.”
“Sometimes it’s easy to fall in love with a product. But ultimately, you’re underwriting the founders. Particularly at the speed the world is moving with AI, you need founders who are high-velocity learners and mentally agile.
“Unconditional love, conditional like. That’s how I think about founder relationships—they have to be rooted in trust, radical transparency, and mutual respect.”
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Original Responses (Lightly Edited for Clarity and Flow)
Background and Personal Journey
Experiences Shaping My Investment Approach
I started my career on the customer side, working at a global agency supporting the brand and media strategy of Fortune500 brands such as H&M, Verizon, PUMA, and 20th Century Fox. I got involved in the NY tech community around 2011, where I started helping startups find their first customers and learn how to do content/media strategy. I left in 2012 to become the 2nd employee at one of the first innovation boutiques that was helping enterprise brands discover and partner with emerging technology, so I’ve been at the forefront of commercializing emerging technology. I also had the opportunity to work at a very early-stage startup, which was a huge learning experience. Having been an operator on both the customer and early-stage startup has given me a unique perspective on what founders need to accomplish, and how to support them effectively. My whole career has been about understanding customer pain points and building strong brands, which is a big part of what Hannah Grey focuses on.
Moment Inspiring Venture Capital Career
When I was at my startup, I was fortunate to meet Chris Fralic, a Partner at First Round Capital which opened my eyes and expanded my thinking about venture capital. He was kind enough to think of me when a corporate VC, MDC Partners (now called Stagwell Group), was recruiting for their CVC- I knew it was the perfect springboard for me to invest and provide strategic support for founders. I jumped at the opportunity to transition to venture capital in 2014 and haven’t looked back. It was a natural progression and embodied everything I loved: being obsessively curious about the latest technology, supporting founders in impactful ways, and studying the customer trends to identify what’s next.
Balancing Intuition with Data
Our AI-OS helps give us what we call “Speed to Signal” to build conviction on opportunities faster. The data helps inform our decisions, but ultimately we see it as a way to augment our acumen and expand our thinking. But venture is very much about intuition and pattern matching, which just happens with time and experience. Particularly when we’re investing pre-product and pre-revenue, it is very founder-centric. Between Kate and I, we’re fortunate to have supported hundreds of founders across 5 prior funds over the past 15+ years, so we have the reps to know what exceptional venture talent looks like. The data and our AppliedAI personas can help validate market dynamics, pull, demand, readiness, etc- we are students of the market and will leverage the data to understand those components.
Philosophy and Insights
Values When Working with Founders
We're deeply committed to being true partners. We’ll proactively share the resources we have available through our onboarding process, and let founders guide where they need support, rather than imposing it. We also operate at 'startup speed,' and are constantly available, responding quickly to their needs with the same urgency they have- there’s usually a late-night text about something! For us, empathy and transparency are key. We strive to truly understand the challenges founders face and be a thought partner for a productive path forward. It's about being present and providing real, tangible value beyond just the capital. We’re constantly striving to help our founders storytell - whether that’s for fundraising or early customer conversations. We’re leveraging our internal AI-workflows to pinpoint prospective ICPs, identify messaging that is most likely to resonate, surface friction points or barriers to adoption, and find the right pathways to accelerate product market fit and de-risk your GTM motions. After you raise venture financing it typically goes to two buckets: recruiting talent, or finding customers - we help on the customer side in a scalable, modernized way.
The Perfect Founder Pitch
The perfect pitch tells a compelling story with a clear, non-consensus insight about the way the world is moving. It should articulate the growing pain point, their hypothesis on the solution, why it could only be done now, and why the founders are uniquely positioned to be the winning team - what’s their superpower edge? I want to see a massive vision that might be uncomfortable today, but demonstrates a differentiated perspective of the future. Particularly, we want to understand how they’re thinking about a data collection and customer experience moat. This is increasingly important in an AI-first world, where defensibility can unravel overnight - how are they able to stay nimble, building a brand, and compounding data loops that make for a stickier, better experience? How and why will they get customers to care, stick around, and continue to pay? That combination of ambition and tactical clarity can make a pitch memorable.
Trends and Future Vision
Challenges for Early-Stage Founders
We’re in an unprecedented moment of change, the ground is constantly shifting under our feet with what’s possible and what the large incumbents are coming out with. It’s never been more important for founders to be curious, creative, and imaginative on the macro vision, while staying agile and current on the new capabilities. It’s a constant push/pull for short and long term strategic thinking. Founders need to stay focused on building a durable business, yet expectations are around high velocity revenue - which may or may not end up being healthy revenue or with the right ICP given the interest in trying new tools. It’s important to constantly think 3 chess moves ahead, and ensure you’re setting a strong foundation to build front. Demonstrating urgency and speed is important - but it’s very easy to get distracted at the pace the market is moving.
Exciting Trends and Technologies
One category we’ve been excited about is a new part of the AI stack we call ActionOps and Trust Layered AI. Similar to how DevOps scaled human shipping code, ActionOps will help AI agents ship actions at scale. We believe there’s an exciting category emerging around the orchestration, infrastructure and trust stack that will enable agents to take stable, reliable actions at scale in dynamic environments (e.g. browsers, APIs, apps, etc.). Our last Vibrations journal explored the rise of "Silent Conversations" - the A2A (Agent to Agent) Economy, where autonomous agents will discover, negotiate, and transact with each other. It's an inevitable future, but also becoming clear we're getting ahead of ourselves. Agents can think- but they’re still failing in the real world, e.g. Browsers are crashing, UI changing, and there’s limited retry logic or observability - they're breaking and eroding trust. So while everyone is building agents, it seems they're all still running on legacy infrastructure designed for humans, not autonomous systems. Are we expecting a new future while retrofitting existing devtools?
Before agents can collaborate, they need to act — and acting at scale will require agent-native infrastructure, this is where ActionOps comes in. Culturally, this ties back to other signals we’re tracking around people are becoming “AI Ambivalent”, skeptical of tools they can’t audit or control. Additionally, the Cost of Hesitation is rising with fake reviews, hallucinated steps, and unpredictable agent behavior fuels that distrust. To move towards a true agentic future, we need action integrity, better accountability, and verification - this is Trust Layered AI.