The Sentinel Global has reunited a senior investment team that had previously invested in top companies such as Airbnb, Databricks, DoorDash and Uber and delivered 25 exits (20 IPOs) and tens of billions in returns.
With the new top talent, the firm plans to go to market with a new fund in 2026. The firm has more than 70 years of deep institutional experience with entrepreneurial success, having built and exited advanced technology companies. This unique combination allows the firm to effectively bridge the gap between innovators shaping the future and organizations focused on scaling it.
The new team includes veteran investor and new General Partner Ethel Chen, who previously worked with Sentinel Global Managing Partner Jeremy Kranz, at GIC, the sovereign investment fund of Singapore. Chen, a former Sequoia Capital Global Equities investor, joins with a track record of investing in top technology and AI names including Anthropic, Databricks, Zoom and Snowflake. Chen has also served as a lead investor and board observer for companies like Amplitude and Stack Overflow.
Beyond reuniting the dynamic duo, Sentinel Global sees its unique value in terms of structure and capabilities.
Many venture firms offload work, including advising their portfolio companies, to junior staff. Sentinel, however, is designed with a senior team to give founders experienced counsel that they demand. The team is supported by automation and AI tools to move at the speed of startups today. Using Sentinel’s proprietary internal AI applications, the firm can bring critical insights based on its reach and experience across global markets. This firm doesn’t offload critical work to an army of analysts, Kranz said.
“Sentinel is designed for the way venture actually works now: senior relationships, deep domain judgement and speed, along with modern research and AI rails," Kranz said. "We’re bringing the band back together and investing in the infrastructure to serve founders and LPs more directly.”
To provide deeper insights, the firm is also embarking on a major expansion of its Sentinel Labs research arm, which produces research, convenings and practical analyses for founders and limited partners. It also creates in-depth customized research for specific critical decisions, such as how to rebalance a portfolio in an AI bubble or how to measure the true stability of a stablecoin.
This proprietary research provides the secret sauce for technology companies and large investment firms to make decisions in a world moving at AI speed. Sentinel Labs builds on the team’s previous work building Bridge Forum, a major international event which connects global companies with venture-backed innovators.
Sentinel Labs latest endeavor includes Sago, a generative platform that provides ready to use, designed reports in minutes, not months. Sago's agentic operating system empowers venture funds to achieve institutional precision, pursue entrepreneurial freedom, and focus on crucial relationships.
Limited partners are typically just the capital behind venture firms. But Sentinel Global’s Unlimited Partner model uses a hands-on approach that treats LPs as an active network informing investment theses and venture support. The firm also developed Sago, an AI product for investment management, which replaces humans for critical analysis across some core investment management functions. Five LPs have been onboarded to initial tools and workflows, and more functionality is planned. Sentinel's goal goes beyond financial returns to help LPs advance their understanding of tech enablement across traditional industries.
“LPs and founders don’t need hype, they need an advantage they can use," Kranz said. "We’ve built a platform that makes research actionable, enterprise engagement repeatable, and AI practical, not theoretical.”
Sentinel Global is a thematic investor that focuses on three overlapping domains. AI Enterprise is the trust layer for autonomous systems, including verifiable inference, private compute and agentic governance. Programmable money covers machine-to-machine financial rails enabling instant 24/7 global settlement. Connected commerce involves digitizing physical infrastructure to close the loop between intelligence and the real world.
Copyright © 2026 California Business Journal. All Rights Reserved.
For California Business Journal Disclaimers, go to /terms-conditions/.




