Kat Lopez Joins LDV Capital As a Content & Marketing Lead

LDV Capital invests in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis. We regularly host Vision events – check out when the next one is scheduled.

I was trained as a journalist but started my career at a marketing agency where I gained experience, and fell in love with all things digital — digital strategy, social media marketing, email marketing, content marketing, SEO, copywriting, and more. In about 5 years, I'd had the opportunity to iterate and help improve all the steps in the digital marketing process and I was ready to step outside my comfort zone again and learn something new. I accepted a different challenge and joined the startup Looksery. It was one of the first AR experiences based on a face-tracking technology you could test for yourself on a mobile device. My role was to lead marketing campaigns, like our Kickstarter, as well as perform PR outreach. Snapchat acquired Looksery in 2015 and now you can all play with our lenses. I learned lots of new things, made new connections, and truly loved this immersion into the startup world.

Later, I joined another startup, this time in the 3D printing space — Kwambio. They specialize in 3D printing of ceramic objects. It was challenging to market something that nobody Googled about yet but it’s incredibly gratifying to see the result of our work in art galleries all around the world. Today, you could wake me up at 4 AM and I would be able to explain to you anything about this technology with a few unique use-cases thrown in there. I’m especially proud to note that Kwambio was featured in all kinds of media outlets. To name a few: The Times (UK) newspaper, Washington Post, Fast Company, Business Insider, The New Web, WALLPAPER, DWELL magazine, and Vogue magazine. 

Together with the Kwambio team, we went through two acceleration programs. We were in Techstars Boston Summer class of 2015, and we were lucky to get in the first batch of STANLEY + Techstars accelerator in 2019 in Connecticut. This program is focused on AI in advanced manufacturing and was founded in the partnership of Techstars and the global industry leader Stanley Black & Decker.

On the side, I was consulting for eCozy, a Munich-based startup in smart home, and JetSmarter, a Florida-based startup in private aviation recently acquired by Vista Global.

I caught the itch to be constantly building, measuring, and making things better for startups working on remarkable visual technologies. With startups, I was able to work on a bunch of different things at once. I never really cared what was written on my business card — I cared about the company, our products, our team, our clients, our partners, and of course our connections with the media. 

In joining LDV Capital earlier this year, I am excited to continue to help build visual technology businesses to solve problems and hopefully improve our world. It is extremely exciting to see unique businesses leveraging AI, machine learning, and computer vision. The more I learn about cutting edge visual technologies and new ways people are deploying them to build businesses, the more intrigued I become of how the future will be.

I was always interested in gadgets — thankfully, all the Kickstarter projects that I backed were delivered! My newest hobby is drone flying and aerial photography. I hope that working at a venture capital firm will bring me more opportunities to try new tech before it becomes available to the market.

I’m fascinated with our annual research projects — LDV Insights — where we deep dive into an industry ripe for disruption via visual tech, and this year’s topic is relevant to all of us. In the past, LDV analyzed visual technologies in Healthcare, Logistics & Manufacturing. I can’t wait to share more details but hopefully, you’ll learn it from some top-tier media outlet in the near future.