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Distinct shells carrying a filed role for this person — not every shell they have ever touched.
Of those vehicles, the ones that closed a merger.
Announced but not closed, and still hunting.
No closed vehicle here has both a stored price and a filed trust value to score it against.
2 liquidated — weigh against the wins.
3 vehicles on file, newest listing first
2 people on two or more of them
Samir Kaul is a Founding Partner and Managing Director at Khosla Ventures, the prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm founded by Vinod Khosla, where he focuses on artificial intelligence, advanced technology, health, sustainability, and food. Based in Menlo Park, California, Kaul has been with Khosla Ventures since early 2006, when he left Flagship Ventures to help build the firm alongside Khosla. He serves as a director and officer of Khosla Ventures Acquisition Co. and Khosla Ventures Acquisition Co. III (SPACs tickered KVSA and KVSC), which completed their IPOs on March 26, 2021. At Khosla Ventures, Kaul is known for embracing extreme technical risk while avoiding conventional market risk, hunting for non-consensus deals where the underlying science is robust even if the establishment is skeptical. He personally led the firm's early, outsized bet on OpenAI—described as the first and largest check into the company at the time, reportedly a $50 million investment. His notable portfolio companies with successful exits include Guardant Health, Nutanix, Oscar (Hims & Hers), QuantumScape, Vicarious Surgical, View, and Raxium, while other significant investments span Impossible Foods, Impossible Foods, Mojo Vision, Mainspring Energy, Varda Space, Ultima Genomics, Ceibo, DoorDash, Affirm, Instacart, Opendoor, Square, and many others across deep tech, biotech, climate, and digital health.
Kaul's career began in genomic sciences. He grew up in a family of engineers and doctors—his father and uncle were early engineers at a pioneering satellite communications company where he worked during summers—but biology became his true passion in high school. He attended the University of Michigan, majoring in biology and teaching undergraduate biochemistry, then pursued graduate studies in biochemistry at the University of Maryland. While at Maryland, he heard Craig Venter speak about the genomics revolution and joined Venter's Institute for Genomic Research (TIGR), where he worked on the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana and was promoted to lead the project both within TIGR and internationally as chairperson of the Arabidopsis Genome Initiative (AGI). Under his direction, the project was completed years ahead of schedule and well under budget, culminating in a landmark publication in Nature in December 2000. He has published seven peer-reviewed papers in genomics, including the first complete genome of a flowering plant. After genome sequencing became routine, Kaul attended Harvard Business School, earning an MBA to transition into industry.
Upon graduating from HBS, Kaul joined Flagship Ventures, where over five years he started and invested in early-stage biotechnology companies. His investments and co-foundations during this period included Helicos BioSciences (NASDAQ: HLCS), co-founded with Stan Lapidus and Steve Quake; Epitome (acquired by Millipore); Codon Devices, where he served as founding CEO, raised the Series A financing, built the technical and advisory teams, and booked significant revenues in the company's first year; LS9 (acquired by Renewable Energy Group); and Morphotek (acquired by Eisai). Vinod Khosla had been a seed investor in Codon Devices, and through that relationship Khosla persuaded Kaul to join him in early 2006 to co-found Khosla Ventures, initially focusing on renewable energy, clean technologies, and life sciences. Since then, Kaul has been a cofounder or founding investor in companies including Calera, Cogenra, CoSkata, Gevo (GEVO), KiOR (KIOR), LanzaTech, Sakti3, and has led investments in Amyris (AMRS), Ausra (acquired by Areva), Draths (acquired by Amyris), Praj Industries (BSE:PRAJ), Stion, Transonic Combustion, Segetis, NanoH2O, Soladigm, and numerous early-stage science projects.
Kaul is actively engaged in philanthropy and academic leadership. He joined the Board of Directors of The Michael J. Fox Foundation in 2025 and serves on the board and chairs the Development Committee of UCSF Benioff Childr
This record is keyed to SEC CIK 0001501915 — the identifier this person files under in their own name. Every vehicle above is a filing made under that CIK, so “the same person on two shells” is a fact about an SEC identifier rather than about a name that happens to match.
Roles are the strings the filings used, in the order they were filed. Nothing on this page ranks them, infers seniority, or offers a reason why any two of these names recur — a recurrence is a count, and the filings that produced it are linked beside every row. We also hold 122 institutional-holder rows on these vehicles, under 55 distinct name strings, and none of them is counted across vehicles: that table has no CIK column, and matching holders by name would merge firms that are not the same firm.