Caleb Appleton is a Principal at Bison Ventures where he has led investments across techbio and applied AI. During his time at Bison he has helped lead the firm's investments in Vivodyne, Cobot, and a stealth therapeutics business.
Prior to investing at Bison, Caleb was an investor at Innovation Endeavors, where he focused on frontier technology investments across surgical robotics (RBOT), drug discovery (Eikon Therapeutics, Dewpoint Therapeutics), next generation hardware (Skylo) and applied AI (Cosmos Innovation, Citrine Informatics). Prior to joining Bison, Caleb spent two years at a growth-stage IE portfolio company, TuneIn, as Senior Vice President and GM leading a $50M P&L. Caleb began his career at Bain & Company. He also sits on the advisory board for the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory.
When not investing, Caleb can reliably be found on two wheels trying to outrun the San Francisco fog. He is also way too particular about his coffee: roasting his own beans and constantly tinkering with his latte art.
Bison Ventures invests in frontier technology businesses using innovative science and technology to solve the world’s most pressing problems. Bison is investing out of its $135M first fund.
EVCA: Describe a defining moment in your career and how it shaped where you are today.
Caleb: When I left Innovation Endeavors, I spent the better part of a year working on a startup of my own in the healthcare services space. Despite having offers for a substantial round of seed financing, I decided not to move forward with the idea.
Ultimately, I just couldn’t convince myself that the venture model was the right fit for financing the business because I didn’t see a clear path to a venture-scale outcome. This decision was incredibly difficult, but has proven to be the right one. It has also substantially changed how I approach the VC role and how I evaluate businesses.
Having played both sides of the ‘pitch,’ I’m much more aware of how acutely challenging the role of founder is as well as how rare businesses are that truly fit the venture model. As such, I do my best to be constructive and not critical and provide true partnership throughout the diligence process.
EVCA: What is an emerging technology trend that will have a significant impact on the world in the next decade?
Caleb: I’m excited about the expansion of artificial intelligence beyond the world of bits and into the world of atoms. Over the next decade, I expect to see increasingly performant physical world embodiments of AI (robots, machinery, autonomous vehicles, etc) that substantially improve our productivity, safety and overall quality of life. We are already beginning to see the first glimpses of this in semi-structured environments like warehouses where autonomous devices are addressing labor market challenges and relieving humans of dull, dirty and dangerous work; we are excited to be partnered with Cobot on this front.
I expect that the transformation to a Jetson’s like future will take longer than the current fundraising momentum in the AI category suggests, but in about a decade when we are looking back, I think the impact will be undeniable.
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