Dave Yen

Dave Yen is a Co-founder and General Partner at Orange Collective, an early-stage venture capital firm based in San Francisco, California. He currently co-manages over $100 million in total assets under management, a figure that includes a $50 million second fund closed in March 2025, to invest exclusively in Y Combinator alumni. His venture portfolio features more than twenty early-stage technology startups, highlighting notable equity positions in prominent artificial intelligence developers such as Perplexity AI and Replicate. Prior to transitioning into venture capital, Yen studied computer science at Stanford University and founded Chai Research, an artificial intelligence software startup that was acquired by Google in July 2024. He now focuses on leveraging his direct operational background to back early-stage founders who are building next-generation machine learning applications, enterprise developer tools, and frontier technologies.