Lee Edwards
VCGeneral Partner, Root Ventures
Hard tech seed investor with engineering background
Background
Lee Edwards is a General Partner at Root Ventures, a San Francisco-based seed fund focused on hard tech and technical founders. He joined Root Ventures in 2018, covering the software thesis including developer tools, infrastructure, data science tooling, and applied AI/ML. Before venture, he was CTO and VP of Engineering at Teespring, and prior to that held engineering roles at Pivotal Labs and iRobot. He holds a degree in Systems Design Engineering from Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering. Root Ventures Fund IV targets $250M and the team invests up to $5M in seed-stage companies.
Investment Thesis
Backing seed-stage technical founders building hard tech, developer tools, infrastructure software, and AI-driven systems where deep technical insight is essential.
Investment Focus
Stages
Typical check: $500K–$2M
Sectors
Based in: San Francisco, CA, USA (North America)
Notable Investments
Trieve
Root Ventures led $3.5M seed, Sep 2024
Daily.co
Series B, Nov 2021
Privacy Dynamics
Root Ventures led $4M seed, Dec 2021
Okteto
Seed, Sep 2020
HASH
Seed, Jun 2020
Great Expectations
Root Ventures led $4.1M seed (Dec 2019); data quality framework
Zed
Seed and Series A/B follow-on; collaborative code editor
Meroxa
Root Ventures led $4.1M seed (Jul 2020); Lee Edwards on board