Hemant Taneja
CEO and Managing Director
Investment Team
I am the CEO and Managing Director of General Catalyst, a founder, investor, and author.
My vision for General Catalyst is to be the world’s foremost investment and transformation company, supporting global resilience through applied AI. I first laid out my AI thesis in my 2018 book Unscaled, which explored how the economy of the future will be won by upstarts leveraging AI for hyper-focused markets. I believe in investing in the critical systems that underpin modern democracies and their allies—our global resilience thesis—and transforming every industry through innovative partnerships.
I am an early investor in companies like Stripe, Samsara (NYSE: IOT), Snap (NYSE: SNAP), Gitlab (NASDAQ: GTLB), Grammarly, Gusto, Applied Intuition, Anduril, Ro, and Canva. My recent focus as an investor has been on Applied AI and sustainability with focus on companies like Crescendo, Re:Build Manufacturing, and Charm Industrial.
One critical industry I’ve set a goal to transform is healthcare. My 2020 book, UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance, co-authored with Dr. Stephen Klasko, CEO of Jefferson Health, details our thesis for how the healthcare system needs to transform a “sick care” system into a Health Assurance system that is proactive, accessible and affordable. I have helped create several companies to architect a health assurance system in America including Livongo (acquired by Teladoc in an $18.5B merger, the largest in digital health history at the time), Commure, Transcarent, Tendo, Homeward, and Hippocratic.
I also serve as the Founder and Chairman of the Health Assurance Transformation Company (HATCo) that is working closely with several major health systems worldwide to drive their transformations. HATCO also announced its intention to acquire Summa Health, an integrated health system in Akron, Ohio in 2024.
I started my career as a founder, building a small mobile software company that was acquired, before joining General Catalyst as an entrepreneur-in-residence in 2002. I found my passion as an entrepreneur serving entrepreneurs and have been with GC investing and building companies ever since.
I’m an advocate for Responsible Innovation, aligning innovation with the long-term interests of society by engineering for growth and good with focus on inclusivity and sustainability as outlined in my 2022 book Intended Consequences: How to Build Market-Leading Companies with Responsible Innovation.
In addition to my roles serving on many of our portfolio company boards, I am also Co-Founder and Chairman of the non-profits Responsible Innovation Labs and Advanced Energy United, trustee at Northeastern University and the Stanford School of Medicine Board of Fellows, and am a founding board member of Khan Lab School, an innovative K-12 school.
I hold five degrees from MIT: M.Eng. EECS, S.M. Operations Research, S.B. Biology, S.B. Mathematics, and S.B. EECS. And I’m a proud husband and father to three kids.