M12

Michelle Gonzalez runs M12 as a Microsoft corporate vice president and global head, a dual title that reflects the fund's position inside the parent company rather than beside it. Four managing partners carry the investing load: Cheryl Cheng, Todd Graham, Peter Lenke and Michael Stewart, supported by partners Alan Du, Alessandro Levi and James Wu, with senior associates Tracy Liu and Shun Hagiwara on the junior bench. The structure below the deal team is what separates a corporate fund from a financial one. Tero Collin heads fund operations and strategy, Elizabeth Fitzgerald heads marketing, and Marty Collins leads a standing portfolio development group of six whose job is routing portfolio company management teams into Microsoft's field and co-sell organization. Christopher Young, Microsoft's executive vice president for business development, sits above the function.

M12 does not raise outside limited partner capital. Microsoft funds it directly off the corporate balance sheet as an evergreen vehicle, which is why no Form D offering filings exist for the firm and why its roughly $2 billion in assets carries no vintage-year structure. The unit launched in March 2016 as Microsoft Ventures, the umbrella for Microsoft's accelerator and seed programs, then split in two: M12 took the venture investing mandate and Microsoft Accelerator kept the enablement programs. The rebrand to M12 followed in April 2018, chosen because M stands for Microsoft and entrepreneur has twelve letters. The fund writes checks from seed through Series B, historically extending to Series D, and operates from five offices in Seattle, San Francisco, New York, Tel Aviv and London. A dedicated GitHub Fund sits alongside the main portfolio. The current mandate concentrates on five themes: AI apps, security for AI, AI cloud infrastructure, AI data operations and models, and deep tech and systems.