Founding Partner & Managing Partner at Root Ventures · Joined 2013
View Live Interactive Profile →Avidan Ross built a genuinely unusual path into venture capital - an embedded systems engineer at Excite@Home who became CTO of CIM Group, a $15 billion investment firm focused on industrial internet strategy, before literally designing robotics for the Food Network's kitchens. That hands-on engineering credibility, still visible in his hobby of building custom 1,000-degree pizza ovens, shapes Root Ventures' entire identity since he founded it in 2013: a seed fund explicitly run by engineers for engineers, backing startups where significant technical depth is required to launch or where engineers are the primary customer. Ross positions himself less as a financial backer and more as what he calls an engineering sherpa, helping portfolio founders debug hardware roadmaps and navigate early manufacturing decisions most generalist investors can't meaningfully advise on. He closed Root's third fund at $150 million in 2022, backing companies spanning robotics, aerospace, agricultural technology, and IoT.