Iliya Bozhkov is a Bulgarian venture capitalist with nearly a decade of experience investing in AI infrastructure, Cybersecurity and Sustainability. Recently joining the IBM Ventures team, he previously served as an Investment Principal at Prosperity7 Ventures, where he established the fund's New York office. His international career includes strategic investment and financial roles in London and The Hague managing full deal cycles. He holds a Master in Finance from London Business School and a Bachelor of Science in Economics and Business from the University of Amsterdam. When he is not spending time with his family, he is planning motorcycle road trips and skydiving jumps.

What is a value, principle, or philosophy that has meaningfully shaped your journey? How does it continue to influence how you invest, lead, or approach challenges?

A guiding principle that fundamentally shapes my journey is "contextual adaptability"—a mindset forged by living, studying, and investing across diverse ecosystems, from Bulgaria, Amsterdam and London to the Middle East and New York. Navigating these contrasting cultural and professional environments taught me that success is rarely a one-size-fits-all formula, and that the most resilient solutions often emerge at the intersection of different worldviews. This global lens directly influences how I evaluate companies; I actively look for founders who exhibit the cultural agility to scale internationally and the empathy to navigate shifting market dynamics from day one. When leading teams or structuring complex deals in deep-tech and AI infrastructure, I rely on this cross-cultural fluidity to synthesize heterogeneous perspectives, align differing incentives, and uncover strategic value where others might only see friction.

Is there a technology, idea, or movement that most people overlook which you believe will define the next era of innovation? What draws you to this perspective?

While transformers currently dominate the AI landscape, the next era of innovation will likely be defined by alternative architectures—such as State Space Models (SSMs) and neuromorphic computing—that bypass the quadratic scaling bottlenecks of traditional attention mechanisms. Crucially, these paradigms are optimized for a rapidly diversifying heterogeneous hardware base, moving past a monolithic reliance on standard GPUs. By decoupling computation from rigid hardware constraints, advanced software orchestration layers can fluidly distribute workloads across diverse clusters of specialized silicon—a dynamic that perfectly mirrors the flexibility and decentralized principles of hybrid cloud computing (core IBM pillar). Just as navigating diverse global markets requires contextual adaptability, building resilient AI infrastructure demands open-source ecosystems (another IBM pillar) and algorithms that can seamlessly adapt to the unique strengths of this varied silicon landscape. Ultimately, embracing this orchestration-first approach unlocks true hardware-software co-design, ensuring the next wave of AI infrastructure is prepared to scale across everything from today's edge deployments to tomorrow's quantum systems.

Is there a company, initiative, or resource you’d like to highlight for readers?

If there is one resource I consistently recommend to founders and fellow investors, it is Elad Gil's blog. I first started following his work after reading his High Growth Handbook, which remains one of the most pragmatic, battle-tested guides for scaling startups past the initial product-market fit stage. As someone who evaluates and supports early-stage AI infrastructure and enterprise software companies, I find his tactical breakdowns on market defensibility, late-stage funding, and the evolving generative AI landscape incredibly grounding. He consistently avoids high-level platitudes in favor of actionable, operator-driven insights that mirror the real-world complexities of building a breakout company. For anyone looking to understand the mechanics of hypergrowth or the frontier of AI markets without the noise, his writings are an absolute masterclass.