Carli Stein, investor at M12, is one of our top 50 Rising Stars in corporate venturing for 2025.
It was an internship at the US Department of Treasury – and the antiquated software she had to wrestle with there – that convinced Carli Stein she wanted to work at a tech-forward company, chasing innovation.
She joined Microsoft as a business development intern in 2019 and eventually joined the ventures team as an investor.
In her current role as Investor at M12, Stein is most excited about seeing how enterprises will be deploying AI at scale. This includes building the infrastructure to power AI agents and the necessary tooling around security, identity, payments, or other middleware needed to make it happen.
Enterprises bringing more task-optimised small language models on board is another strong trend she will be looking out for, as well as the way they will transform the personalisation of customer interactions.
“Do not get too excited about every company, because you want people to be able to trust that when you find the right one, it is the one that you should run at”
“A lot of the assumptions that we thought were true two years ago are shifting now in terms of what we see is the next wave of applications and infrastructure,” she says.
“We have spent much of the past two years focused on investing in startups that are building that infrastructure and tooling for enterprises to really be able to deploy AI.”
One of the most important things up-and-comers in the industry can do, she says, is to learn to ask the right questions to help you build the conviction you need to pursue the opportunity you believe in.
“Have a point of view. Do not just say it looks okay or that it seems fine. Save the companies that you are really excited about and share those with others,” she says. “But also do not get too excited about every company, because you want people to be able to trust that when you find the right one, it is the one that you should run at.”
People wanting to get into venture should not be discouraged, she says, by the idea that venture capital is the exclusive domain of finance people.
See the full list of Rising Stars 2025 here.
