Leo Polovets
VCCo-Founder & Partner Emeritus, Susa Ventures
Engineer-investor known as the Coding VC
Background
Leo Polovets is Co-Founder and Partner Emeritus at Susa Ventures (transitioned to emeritus in 2024) and General Partner at Humba Ventures, which he launched in 2021. He was the second engineering hire at LinkedIn, worked on payment fraud detection at Google, and was an early engineer at Factual. He built the CodingVC blog, publishing engineering-style frameworks for evaluating startups. At Susa he led investments in Outlier, Pex, Scalyr, and Stedi. Via Humba he writes $250K–$500K checks into deep tech and critical sectors.
Investment Thesis
Enterprise software, developer tools, logistics — approached with an engineer's risk-decomposition framework.
Investment Focus
Stages
Typical check: $250K–$3M
Sectors
Based in: San Francisco, CA (North America)