Today, we’re excited to share that serial entrepreneur and AI expert Lutz Finger is joining Cherry Ventures as a venture partner.

As artificial intelligence continues to change the world around us, many entrepreneurs and operators are more deeply considering how to leverage these new technologies and further improve them. At Cherry, we see many powerful opportunities for entrepreneurs and businesses overall in AI and beyond. Therefore, we are bringing aboard specialists in this field who can share their first-hand knowledge and experiences with our founders as they grow their businesses and embark on the next wave of European tech.

That’s where Lutz comes in.

Based in San Francisco, Lutz has already actively contributed to Cherry over the past year, working with many of our founders on AI and product topics plus co-hosting our podcast on frontier technologies with our partner Jasper Masemann. He recently spoke at our Cherry Summit hosted in London — you can see a snippet above — providing a special update on AI to our LPs. This will all continue in his new role as we set out to launch a new season of the podcast and provide even more dedicated support to founders along AI, data science, and product.

Lutz brings a wealth of experience, following years spent building and directing product and data science divisions at international technology companies like Google, Snap, LinkedIn, and Marpai, where he most recently served as the President of Product and Development. Plus, true to our founders first mission, he was even a founder himself, having built a startup tackling AI and product, and knows the daily grind of entrepreneurship all too well.

For the past several years, Lutz has been a professor at Cornell University’s SC Johnson College of Business teaching courses on AI Strategy and Application and Designing Data Products. Going forward, he’s launching an online course with the university in which he’ll replace himself with an AI clone.

With Lutz on our side, we look forward to continue making Cherry the active ingredient for founders and startup success in Europe.