Christina Melas-Kyriazi
Christina Melas-Kyriazi focuses on early-stage investments in AI applications. She is based in San Francisco, and before BCV was a product leader at Affirm and an active angel investor.
Portfolio Highlights
About
I am a product manager at heart.
When I meet a founder, I want to know how they think about their customer. How deeply do they understand the problem? What have they earned the right to know that nobody else does? How do they make hard tradeoffs? I like product-oriented domain experts and divergent thinkers. The best founders I've worked with bend reality to their will. I saw this up close with Max Levchin at Affirm, who moved the goalposts on what was possible so often that our team kept surprising itself.
I love competing on a team.
Being on a high-performing team is one of the great joys in life. Win or lose, you show up and give everything to the next match. In high school I ran competitively, and venture has a track team feel to it: you score individually, but you win as a team. I still run. You can find me in the Presidio most weeks, stopping for the obligatory selfie with the Golden Gate Bridge. Every time, I stand there looking at the bay and think about how lucky I am to be in this city at this moment in history.
My first passion was energy.
In high school I worked in an aerospace engineering lab. In college I interned at First Solar, got solar panels installed on campus, and ran a speaker series featuring founders of the first cleantech wave. Most of those companies went bust. This time the conditions are different: cheap, abundant energy is the bottleneck to scaling AI.
I've worked at many fast-scaling companies.
I know what it feels like when you're going 100 mph and the wheels are about to come off. I was at LinkedIn when it was newly public, GoFundMe in hypergrowth, and Affirm from before anyone knew what Buy Now Pay Later was through its IPO. Along the way I learned to sell things before they were built, then scramble to build them. I learned to hire people fast without lowering the bar. And I learned that most problems that look like product problems are people and incentive problems.
I started writing angel checks to founders I would work for.
Twenty-some checks later, I realized I liked this more than anything else I'd done. That led me to venture.
There has never been a better time to build a company.
In early 2023, a few months after ChatGPT launched, I gave the FT a quote that went around: "If ChatGPT is the iPhone, we're seeing a lot of calculator apps. We're looking for Uber." I think the Uber moment arrived toward the end of 2025 and accelerated in early 2026. We started seeing companies use the unique properties of AI to rethink an entire user experience, and with it an entire category. Jevons paradox gives me a lot of confidence here. Steam engines tripled coal consumption during the Industrial Revolution. As AI drives down the cost of code, legal work, personal assistants, custom software, coaching, medical advice and other former luxuries, demand for them will explode. We're already seeing it. Now we're getting into the second- and third-order effects of cheap, boundless intelligence. Services rebuilt natively around AI are taking on legal, healthcare, accounting, real estate and every other services market you can name.
These companies will have a bigger TAM than any software market before them.
For the first time, AI can do the work, which means tapping into labor budgets instead of just software budgets. There is a major enterprise diffusion opportunity, which I see up close across Bain Capital. The frontier will capture a lot of gains, but packaging and deploying AI well (provable ROI per task, per token, per vertical) is going to continue to throw off venture scale companies for years.
Background
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Crosby
A hybrid AI law firm that uses AI agents and human lawyers to review contracts like MSAs and NDAs in under an hour.
