Catalytic Capital for Founders Who Choose Hard Problems

Mike Annunziata is the Founder & Managing Partner of Also Capital, an early-stage venture firm that invests in technically ambitious founders early, often before markets are well defined or consensus has formed.

Mike works closely with founders in the early stages of company building, particularly around strategy, hiring, and navigating complex tradeoffs. His involvement reflects a belief that early companies benefit most from engaged partners who understand both the technical and organizational challenges of building from zero.

Before founding Also Capital, Mike co-founded Farther Farms, a vertically integrated, Series B food technology company commercializing novel processing technologies. Earlier in his career, he was a Senior Investment Analyst at the Cornell University Investment Office and began his direct investment career as a student investor at Dorm Room Fund. He holds a BS in Industrial and Labor Relations from Cornell University’s, an MBA from Cornell’s SC Johnson Graduate School of Management, and is a CFA charterholder. He currently serves on the board of Varda Space Industries.

Brandes is an Analyst at Also Capital, where she supports early-stage investment diligence, firm operations, and portfolio companies. She joined Also Capital as a scout in the summer of 2025 and later became the firm’s first full-time investment hire.

Brandes is drawn to founders with clear judgment, intellectual honesty, and a strong ability to communicate an original vision. She prefers spending time at the earliest stages, understanding how people think and make decisions before external signals are legible.

Before Also Capital, Brandes worked at AlphaSights on a specialized research team producing commissioned analysis reports for hedge funds and other credit investors, where she conducted primary research by speaking directly with industry operators. Earlier, she interned at Satori Capital, a growth equity firm investing across consumer, energy, and industrial sectors. She holds a BA in Statistics and Economics from Columbia University.

Andrea is an Executive Assistant at Also Capital, serving as the operational backbone of the team and leading internal coordination across people, processes, and information.

Grounded in her background in philosophy and experience running a small business, she brings a practical, systems-driven mindset to building processes that create clarity and momentum across the firm’s operations.

Will is the CEO and Co-founder of Varda Space Industries, the first company commercializing in-space manufacturing for earth-sized markets and backed by Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Caffeinated Capital, Also Capital and more.

Will started his career at SpaceX where he was a hardware engineer working on the Falcon rocket and Dragon spacecraft, before flying 8 flights to the ISS from mission control as the lead of the dragon spacecraft. He subsequently spent time at Bank of America as a Director of Global Equities Technology before founding Varda Space Industries in November of 2020 where he serves as CEO.

Will is a co-founder of Also Capital and holds a BS in Applied Physics from Cornell, and Masters of Systems Engineering from Cornell. In his free time, he maintains and flies his Cozy Mark 4 experimental aircraft.

Colin is on the founding team at Vast, the leading private space station developer backed by Stellar and Ripple co-founder, Jed McCaleb.

Vast is developing humanity’s next-generation space stations and pioneering the path to long-term living and thriving in space. Haven-1, scheduled to be the world’s first commercial space station, is currently in integration and is expected to launch in Q1 2027. Vast is also developing Haven-2, the proposed successor to the International Space Station, designed to serve NASA’s Commercial LEO Destinations program as a microgravity laboratory in space. Vast’s long-term ambition is to create artificial gravity habitations that enable humans to live in space, reaffirming its commitment to ensuring a spacefaring future for all.

Colin spent over a decade at SpaceX where he architected battery and actuation systems for the most powerful launch vehicle ever developed, Starship. He also led the Propulsion Components team for the Crew Dragon spacecraft from concept through the first human flights, which has now successfully flown over 40 astronauts to the International Space Station. He holds a Master's Degree in Mechanical Engineering from Virginia Tech where he was granted two patents and produced peer reviewed publications on smart materials and sensors, novel actuators, and robotic systems.

Jamie Cox is the Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Fluidstack, one of the largest AI cloud platforms in the United States.

Under his leadership, Fluidstack has become Google’s first and primary TPU cloud partner and is building multiple gigawatts of data center capacity to support the next generation of AI infrastructure.

The company runs critical infrastructure for leading AI labs including Anthropic and Mistral, and has scaled from a university project to a business generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

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Daniela is the co-founder of goTenna, the mobile mesh networking leader acquired by ground autonomy unicorn Forterra.

Daniela bootstrapped the company to a prototype before raising venture capital from Founders Fund and Union Square Ventures. As CEO, she scaled goTenna to 350+ government agencies and shipped four generations of hardware powered by Aspen Grove, a novel zero-control-packet protocol.

She also co-created the Juicebox encryption key recovery protocol alongside Signal founder Moxie Marlinspike. Named to Fast Company’s Most Creative People in Business and featured in The New York Times for her political advocacy, Daniela now lives in Los Angeles and selectively angel invests and advises founders.

Shaurya Luthra is a technology leader and entrepreneur focused on solving one of the space industry’s most pressing challenges: scaling ground infrastructure to handle the rapidly increasing volume of satellite data. As Cofounder and Head of Digital at Northwood Space, he is building software-defined, phased-array ground station networks that enable high-throughput, pervasive satellite communications at global scale.

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Before founding Northwood Space in 2023 with Bridgit Mendler and Griffin Cleverly, Shaur worked on advanced space systems at Lockheed Martin Space and Capella Space. His career spans satellite communications, RF systems, and scalable aerospace software — all focused on enabling the next wave of commercial space innovation.

At Northwood, Shaur is driven by the belief that reliable, scalable space connectivity infrastructure is foundational to unlocking transformative applications for science, industry, and humanity.

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Shaur’s dedication to meaningful impact has been recognized by the Matthew Isakowitz Foundation, where he was named a 2025 Rising Star and as a selection for Forbes’ 2026 30U30. His journey into space technology began with a strong sense of purpose instilled by his family and community after moving from India to the United States. He pursued his passion for space at Cornell University, earning both a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Engineering in Electrical and Computer Engineering.