Hanabi Capital Research
Investment Thesis
Hanabi Capital is an early-stage venture fund founded in 2025 by Mike Volpi, Bryan Offutt, and Ishani Thakur, all former partners at Index Ventures. The firm backs technology-driven, technical founders building foundational companies in artificial intelligence, robotics, and software/data infrastructure, with a stated preference for teams working at the base of the software stack rather than thin application-layer wrappers. Hanabi operates without traditional outside LP capital, deploying Mike Volpi's personal capital along with contributions from friends and family, which gives the fund flexibility on check size and pacing relative to a traditional institutional vehicle.
Stage Focus
Hanabi invests at Pre-Seed, Seed, and Series A, most often as a smaller check alongside a lead investor rather than as the anchor of the round. Multiple third-party sources place the bulk of activity at Seed and Series A.
Check Size
Typical checks range from $100K to $2M, with a sweet spot around $1M. This is consistent with a fund that plays a supporting, high-conviction role in competitive rounds rather than pricing and leading them.
Lead Tendency
Hanabi predominantly follows rather than leads. Its confirmed recent investments (Traversal's combined seed/Series A, LiveKit's Series C) were both led by larger institutional firms (Sequoia/Kleiner Perkins and Index Ventures, respectively), with Hanabi participating as a smaller co-investor.
Recent Activity
Hanabi has been actively deploying since its 2025 launch. Confirmed activity includes participation in Traversal's $48M combined seed/Series A (June 2025, alongside Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, and NFDG) and continued participation as an existing investor in LiveKit's $100M Series C at a $1B valuation (January 2026, led by Index Ventures). Secondary sources (Tracxn, PitchBook) also list Generalist AI, Netic, Simile, Applied Compute, and 1001.ai among 2025-2026 portfolio additions, though primary-source confirmation for the exact terms of Hanabi's participation in those rounds was not available at time of research.
Portfolio Highlights
Notable named portfolio companies across secondary sources include ClickHouse (data infrastructure, Mike Volpi board seat), LiveKit (real-time/voice AI infrastructure), Cognition (AI coding agents), Cursor (AI code editor), Cerebras (AI chips), Ollama, Temporal, Traversal (AI incident response), Generalist AI (robot foundation models), Netic, Simile, Applied Compute, and 1001.ai. The portfolio skews heavily toward infrastructure and tooling for the current AI buildout rather than consumer or vertical-application startups.
Team
- Mike Volpi, General Partner — Co-founder. Former partner at Index Ventures; earlier Chief Strategy Officer and SVP/GM of Cisco's routing business. Stanford (BS Mechanical Engineering, MS Manufacturing Systems Engineering, MBA). Sits on the boards of Scale AI, ClickHouse, Ferrari, Confluent, and Cohere. Ranked on the 2025 Forbes Midas List.
- Bryan Offutt, Partner — Co-founder. Former Palantir forward-deployed engineer/PM and MemSQL product manager; joined Index Ventures in 2018 focused on ML and software. Stanford BS Computer Science (AI focus). Board seats include Temporal, Starburst, Lightning AI, and Adaptive ML.
- Ishani Thakur, Partner — Co-founder. Former partner at Index Ventures; prior AI researcher/software engineer with robotics and reinforcement-learning work at DeepMind and MIT, plus engineering roles at Confluent, Lyft Level 5, and Google. MIT undergraduate degree.
- Rachel Hansen, Operating Partner — Supports portfolio companies on operating matters.
Decision Process
With three active investing partners and no outside LP committee, Hanabi appears to run a lean partnership-style process rather than a formal investment committee, consistent with its personal-capital fund structure.
Founder Preferences
Hanabi's partners repeatedly emphasize technical founders building deep, foundational technology (AI infrastructure, developer tools, robotics) rather than thin application layers, reflecting the partners' own engineering and infrastructure-investing backgrounds at Index Ventures and Cisco.
Geographic Focus
Headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with a portfolio concentrated in the US, particularly the SF Bay Area.
Note on Website
The URL supplied at intake, https://hanabi.vc/, does not resolve (NXDOMAIN). The firm's actual live website is https://www.hanabi.com. This research and the firm record's website/domain fields reflect the corrected, working domain.