Casey Caruso on Topology Ventures: $75M fund backed by Marc Andreessen, betting on neurotech and technical founders

Summary

Casey Caruso is the managing partner of Topology, a $75M fund backed by investors including Marc Andreessen and a founder of OpenAI. The fund targets technical founders with commercial instincts, concentrating deliberately in neurotech and less fashionable AI categories.

Neurotech stack

Caruso's detailed analysis focuses on the emerging neurotech architecture. The YC Demo Day company that demonstrated apparent "telepathy" uses silent speech technology, which reads muscle movement rather than brain signals. Ultra Ego, the company cited, employs an EMG-based approach requiring roughly 60 sensors. The technology works but lacks seamlessness. The field is moving toward multimodal sensing, combining ultrasound, EEG, and muscle-movement signals in the same way AI shifted from single-modality to multimodal models. Topology has publicly mapped its neurotech landscape at topology.vc/neuro-map.

Merge, a company from Sam Altman, is a Topology investment and another neurotech company gaining momentum. A recent demo on X showed early traction.

YC cohort trends

Caruso observes that current YC founders are pitching products and problems first, treating AI as background infrastructure rather than the main story. That shift makes individual company narratives clearer and traction claims more credible. She also notes a visible drop in founder age, with anecdotal reports of 14-year-olds launching companies with $10K MRR within weeks of starting.