Early Cerebras backer Adit Singh joins Mayfield as infrastructure partner

Adit Singh was a partner at Foundation Capital when he helped source and co-lead the first funding round into then-obscure chip startup Cerebras. By the time Cerebras held its blockbuster IPO in May, Foundation Capital held roughly a 7% stake, making it the third-largest shareholder in the company, now valued at nearly $50 billion. Singh has a new firm to call home: he announced Thursday that he’s joined the 57-year-old Mayfield as an infrastructure partner.

At Mayfield, Singh will invest in hardware, infrastructure software, cybersecurity, and physical AI, saying it was the firm’s strength in semiconductors that drew him to the role. “If you look at Mayfield’s semiconductor portfolio, it’s probably the best in the market right now,” Singh told TechCrunch, pointing to the firm’s investments in Upscale AI, recently valued at $2 billion, and Lumilens, which just raised $700 million at a $5.5 billion valuation. “I’m a chip designer by training,” Singh said. “My secret sauce is being able to look at any workload and see how it works from the application all the way down to the transistor.”

Singh credits his electrical-engineering background with helping him recognize Cerebras’s potential 10 years ago, though he didn’t stay at Foundation as an investor — in 2017 he co-founded Neotribe Ventures, and after four years leading that firm, joined early-stage firm Cota Capital. He says he decided to join Mayfield largely because the size of seed infrastructure deals has ballooned in recent years; while smaller funds often get priced out of mega-seed deals, Mayfield’s $3 billion in assets under management lets it write seed checks of up to $20 million.

Mayfield managing partner Navin Chaddha told TechCrunch that despite knowing Singh for 15 years and sitting on three startup boards together — including Upscale AI and unicorn AI startup Velaura AI — it still took time to convince him to join the firm. “We have been talking for a long time, and this time stars aligned,” Chaddha said.

Why it matters

Singh’s move reflects how seed-stage infrastructure investing has scaled up alongside AI compute demand, pushing even early-stage checks into territory that only funds with billions in assets under management can now write.