Entrepreneur • Investor • Builder

Trace Cohen

A New York City native who's spent the last 15+ years building startups and backing founders.

Currently Managing Director at New York Venture Partners. 3x founder. Columbia MBA. Obsessed with AI, automation, data and the future of technology.

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Named After a Supercomputer

Fun fact: I was named after the TRACE supercomputer — a pioneering Very Long Instruction Word (VLIW) architecture system built by Multiflow Computer in the late 1980s. It was designed to deliver supercomputer performance through innovative software-driven parallelism.

The TRACE could execute up to 28 operations simultaneously per cycle — revolutionary for its time. Maybe that's why I've always been drawn to computing and the cutting edge of technology.

Read the original TRACE technical documentation
3x
Founder
65+
Investments
MBA
Columbia
NYC
Born & Raised

Areas of Expertise

Built from years of building companies, making investments, and studying the technology landscape.

Artificial Intelligence

Deep understanding of AI/ML from both the builder and investor perspective. Tracking the space since before the current wave.

Entrepreneurship

Built and scaled multiple startups from zero. Knows the founder journey from the inside out.

Venture Capital

A decade of early-stage investing across 65+ companies. Pattern recognition from seeing thousands of pitches.

Perspectives

Thoughts on building, investing, and the future of technology.

On Founders
"The best founders I've backed all share one trait: they're obsessed with a problem, not just an idea."
On Building
"Having been on both sides of the table, I can tell you — the hardest part of being a founder isn't raising money. It's knowing when to pivot."
On AI
"AI will create more jobs than it destroys. But they'll be different jobs. The question is whether we're preparing people for that shift."

The Quick Version

I've been building startups since college — founded Brandyourself, Launch.it, and SPOT before transitioning to the investor side. Today I lead investments at New York Venture Partners, where we've backed 65+ early-stage companies in AI, robotics, and developer tools.

Columbia MBA. Syracuse alum. True New Yorker — yes, I have strong opinions about pizza and bagels.