Marcus WebbBattery Ventures Just Promoted Two Partners and the Timing Says a Lot About Where VC Is Headed
April 3, 2026
There's a version of this story that gets written as a LinkedIn post: congratulations, exciting times, looking forward to the next chapter. Two names, a few titles, a firm handshake emoji. And then everyone scrolls past it before lunch.
I don't think that's the right way to read what Battery Ventures just did.
On April 2nd, 2026, Battery Ventures announced two new investing partners: Max Schireson, a former tech-industry CEO who has been working as an operating partner at Battery, and Roland Anderson, a veteran Battery investor who focuses on growth and later-stage companies in the business-software, information-services and enterprise-tech sectors. These aren't random hires from outside. They're not a splashy acquisition of some hot young GP from a competitor firm. Both of these people have been inside Battery for years, doing the work, and now the firm is handing them the keys.
That choice - specifically that choice, at this specific moment - is worth paying attention to if you run a business that depends on software, gets funded by venture capital, or is just trying to figure out where things are going over the next few years.
Who These People Actually Are
Schireson will leverage his decades of technology operating experience to make investments in emerging AI models, as well as companies building quantum-computing and robotics/physical intelligence technology. He isn't a finance guy who learned to talk about tech. Schireson joined Battery after serving as the CEO of open-source database company MongoDB. He then spent roughly a decade as an operating partner inside the firm, sitting on boards, advising portfolio companies, building an understanding of how these businesses actually function from the inside.
Anderson was previously involved with Battery portfolio company Newforma, which was acquired by Ethos Capital in 2023, and ServiceTitan, which went public on Nasdaq (TTAN) in late 2024. He joined the firm in 2014. That's over a decade of carrying the bag before being handed this title.
And then there's the fund sitting behind both of them. Both Anderson and Schireson will be making investments from Battery's latest, $3.25 billion fund, Battery Ventures XV, which closed earlier this year. That fund didn't materialize from nowhere. Battery Ventures XV comes on the heels of 15 announced exit events for the firm in 2025, and over the last five years Battery funds have realized more than $10 billion in liquidity.
So this isn't a firm struggling to justify its existence. This is a firm that just closed a massive fund off the back of real exits, and is now deliberately choosing to staff it with people who already understand what Battery is, rather than going shopping for new personalities.
The Pattern Underneath the Announcement
Here's what I keep coming back to. This isn't a one-off. Battery has been doing this systematically.
Nate was explaining something to me last week - he was talking about how the Empire Strikes Back is actually the worst one, which, I don't know, I've heard this take before, I just nodded - but the point he was making, accidentally, was that the best sequels aren't the ones that try to reinvent everything. They're the ones that deepen what's already there. I think about that when I look at Battery's staffing decisions lately.
Internally, the firm has also been reinforcing its leadership bench. Marcus Ryu, co-founder and former CEO of Guidewire Software, was promoted to general partner, while Zak Ewen, Satoshi Harris-Koizumi, and Justin Rosner advanced to partner roles during the deployment of the previous fund. These are all people who came up through the Battery system, or came in as operators and were absorbed into the investing side over time.
Battery announced nearly a dozen new internal promotions across four offices in July 2025, including the elevation of Justin Rosner - a specialist in industrial technology and life-science tools - to partner, and named four new principals across its venture-capital and private-equity practices, highlighting the firm's penchant for promoting talent from within the firm.
The phrase "penchant for promoting talent from within" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It's the kind of thing that sounds like boilerplate until you see how consistently they actually do it.
Why This Is a Signal and Not Just a Press Release
The VC market coming out of 2021-2023 was a mess. The venture capital industry experienced a turbulent few years. After the explosive growth of 2021, the market entered into a correction phase in 2022 and 2023 where funding rounds slowed down and valuations adjusted downwards. In 2024, however, the VC market started to find its footing again.
Now things are moving again, but the shape of the recovery matters. Global venture capital funding accelerated in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching approximately $141 billion, a 12% quarter-over-quarter increase. As a result, 2025 became the highest-funded year since 2021. AI was the biggest force behind the rise in funding. It represented more than a quarter of total global VC funding in 2025, up from 15% in 2024 and 7% in 2023 - a remarkable jump in just two years.
So there's money moving again. But here's the thing: money moving again after a long dry spell tends to attract a certain kind of investor. People chasing the wave. Generalists who suddenly have strong opinions about AI infrastructure. Firms repositioning themselves around whatever the hot sectors are this quarter.
As the year has progressed, VCs have been increasingly deploying highly specialised strategies. The number of 'generalist' VC funds has been falling, with investors looking towards capturing niche corners of specialist fields.
Battery is doing something different. Battery has spent decades in enterprise software and infrastructure, and the rise of AI slots naturally into that foundation rather than forcing a strategic pivot. They're not pivoting. They're extending. And they're doing it by elevating people who carry that institutional knowledge rather than importing it from somewhere else.
I think this is the right call. I think it's the only call that makes sense for a firm of Battery's profile. And I think the firms that don't make this call - the ones that bolt on new partners from adjacent industries and call it an AI strategy - are going to find out the hard way that the knowledge gap between talking about enterprise software and actually understanding how it gets bought, deployed, and renewed is enormous.
What Schireson's Move Specifically Tells Us
The detail I can't stop thinking about is how long Max Schireson has been inside Battery without the investing title. For the last decade, Schireson - who first joined Battery as an executive-in-residence - has advised many of Battery's cloud and data-focused portfolio companies on tactical and strategic business issues. He has worked with current Battery companies ClickHouse, Cypress, Databricks, Fundamental, InfluxData, LogRocket, Machinify, Mattermost, Orkes, Quantum Art, Quantum Machines and Reflection, as well as exited investments Scuba and StreamSets.
That's a decade of sitting in boardrooms, understanding what those companies actually need, and building relationships with founders across the portfolio. Now he's an investing partner whose specific mandate is AI models, quantum computing, and robotics. That's not a bet on hype. That's a former MongoDB CEO, with ten years of operating-partner pattern recognition, being pointed at the most technically complex investing categories on the planet.
If I were a founder in AI infrastructure or quantum, that's the person I'd want calling me. Not someone who read a TechCrunch article about the space and decided to write a thesis.
What This Means If You Run a Business
I want to be honest about something: when I first started paying attention to stories like this, I used to think VC internal promotions were background noise. HR announcements. Not my department.
Then I spent some time with a CRM tool trying to map out funding relationships in software - I was using the wrong field the whole time, tagging things as portfolio companies when they were actually acquirers, so my whole map was backwards - and in fixing it I started to realize how directly the people sitting inside these firms shape what software gets built, what gets funded, and what gets shut down or acqui-hired. The investors who back your vendors are not neutral parties. They have opinions, incentives, and now, increasingly, real operating experience about what a good software business looks like.
In 2026, venture investors will need to navigate a more selective, quality-driven environment where access, underwriting discipline, and cross-market insights will matter most. After two years of capital scarcity, liquidity is finally returning to the venture ecosystem, even if unevenly.
That selectivity matters to you whether you're raising money or just buying software from companies that are. With rates still substantially higher than during the 2020-2021 boom, startups remain under pressure to show they can use capital efficiently and plot a clear course to profitability. The days of raising millions on a pitch deck and a dream are firmly behind us. When a firm like Battery promotes someone whose entire mandate is to find and fund the most technically credible AI companies, that firm's portfolio over the next five years will reflect those values. The software you're evaluating from a Battery-backed company in 2028 will have been built under the watch of investors who actually understand the technical architecture underneath it.
Helen mentioned last week - she was talking to Harold about retirement planning, apparently they've been mapping it out in a spreadsheet for thirty-one years, which is a level of organization I find genuinely moving - that she looks at who backs a company before she signs anything. I didn't really get it at the time. I do now. Knowing who's sitting at the board table tells you something about how decisions get made when things go wrong.
The Boring Thesis That Keeps Winning
There's a version of venture capital that is exciting and loud - big bets on unproven categories, flashy partner hires from outside, splashy rebrandings around whatever AI terminology was minted this month. And then there's the version that Battery seems committed to: raising $3.25 billion to fund new tech deals, including investments in software companies - a bet that the sector won't be toppled by artificial intelligence-led disruption.
That bet, backed by people who have spent their entire careers actually running and advising software businesses, is not the flashiest story. It's not going to get the same coverage as a firm that just parachuted in some former founder with 800,000 Twitter followers to make a bunch of public bets on AI consumer apps.
But it's the right story. It's the story of a firm that has now realized over $10 billion in liquidity over five years by being deeply, specifically good at one thing, and is now deploying $3.25 billion with the same people - promoted from within - to keep doing it in a market where AI is changing the shape of software without changing the fundamental fact that businesses need software that works, gets deployed, and earns its renewal.
Cal, who I genuinely worry about sometimes - his car situation still isn't resolved and I think he's been sleeping at the office - told me last week that his life coaching philosophy is that you don't change your approach when the market shifts, you get better at executing the approach you already have. I'm not sure that's universally good advice. But I think for Battery Ventures right now, it's exactly right.
The firms that will struggle in this environment are the ones that panicked between 2022 and 2024 and made promises to LPs they couldn't keep, or chased AI so hard they forgot they didn't have the domain knowledge to evaluate the companies they were backing. Battery just answered that problem the quiet way: by promoting the people who have been inside the room for a decade and know exactly what they're looking at.
It's not a bold move. It's a patient one. And in this market, I think patient is going to beat bold.
If you're trying to understand what the next wave of software investment actually looks like, keep your eye on what gets built by firms whose partners have operator DNA baked in. That's the money that knows what it's buying. And right now, at Battery at least, it just got its name on the door.