Amir Zohrenejad
General Partner, Heavybit
Amir Zohrenejad is a General Partner at Heavybit and a serial entrepreneur who co-founded two technical startups: Dataherald and CloudFish. A lifelong enthusiast of software and startups, Amir is particularly passionate about relational databases, applied...
Amir Zohrenejad is a General Partner at Heavybit. He began his journey in software development at UC Berkeley, where he graduated with degrees in both Applied Mathematics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. After graduating, he joined Microsoft as a technical program manager on the Windows Wireless team.
Before joining Heavybit, Amir was the co-founder and served as CTO of Dataherald (YC W21), an open source natural-language-to-SQL library. There, he recruited the researchers and implemented emerging applied AI methodologies that led to the companyâs state-of-the-art solution.
Amir specializes in helping early-stage startups recruit top-tier ML researchers and build applied AI teams that can ship production-ready systems. He brings deep experience in natural language interfaces, database infrastructure, and agent evaluation methodologies. On the go-to-market side, he advises founders on developer-focused strategies, from open source adoption to navigating long enterprise sales cycles with technical buyers.
Everybody at Heavybit is genuinely motivated to help you succeed and will do everything in their power to do that. It's tough starting a company, and it's really nice to have a cohort of people you can ask for advice and then help others in return.
I recommend Heavybit because they have people who truly are there for your interest.
The support we get from Heavybit is unparalleled. Full stop. When we run into a blocker, they donât just cheer from the sidelinesâthey help us trudge right through the thick of it.
Heavybit was the only investor who actually understood what we were building, and they even helped us figure out the business model. Turns out, they got it exactly right. Since then, theyâve kept showing up with advice thatâs both strategic and industry-specific. Itâs rare to find folks who can zoom in and out like that and be useful at both ends.
Skills
Content from the Library
The Long-Horizon Stack
Heavybit General Partner Amir Zohrenejad opens DevGuild with the case that long horizon agents now work, citing OpenAI's 10,000-agent, 88-hour run at the Navier-Stokes problem. He then names the five systems that still need to mature before most engineering teams can deploy them: memory, goal orchestration, durable execution, learning, and tools.
Long-Horizon Agents, Part 2: Memory Is More than Recall
Agents need persistent memory to become performant for long-horizon jobs. Amir Zohrenejad surveys the state of agentic memory and covers whatâs missing.
Lab Notes Ep. #5, The Voice AI Turing Test with Aoden Teo
In episode 5 of Lab Notes, Amir Zohrenejad speaks with Aoden Teo, co-founder and CEO of Miso Labs, about what it will take for voice AI to become truly humanlike. They explore the limitations of today's speech-to-text and text-to-speech pipelines, the promise of full-duplex speech models, and the technical challenges around audio tokenization, turn-taking, emotion, reasoning, and real-time inference.
