Keith Laepple

Summary

Entering his thirteenth year of angel investing and organizing in the Seattle startup community, Keith is excited to now be a co-founder and managing partner of Seattle's new VentureUs investor group, forming in the wake of the final SeaChange Fund in 2022. Keith's personal and group portfolios span SaaS, consumer products, medical, clean energy, ed tech, cosmetics, fashion, fin tech, and more. He's an early investor in longstanding women-led companies including Karissa Bodnar's Thrive Causemetics, Wavely Diagnostics, TomboyX women's apparel, OtoNexus Medical Technologies, GlamHive styling services, and Vidigami Media (B.C.), as well as TipHaus restaurant tip mgmt, ESS Inc. clean energy storage (Oregon), and other Northwest startups. Prior to angel investing, Keith spent over two decades as a Microsoft engineer, manager, and thought leader in operating system development and strategy spanning ten Windows releases. After building core platform technologies catalyzing the PC market in the 1990s, he led technical and business development teams creating hardware, content, partnerships, and industry standards for PCs, smartphones, entertainment, silicon, networking, and more. He holds bachelor’s degrees in Computer Science and Mathematics from Virginia Tech (1990). A twenty-nine year resident of Bellevue, Washington, Keith is a rescue dog owner, far-flung tourist, LGBTQ rights activist, EV, smart home and fitness geek, beach goer, e-biker, and occasional snowboarder.