Rebellion Ventures

Leaders of the Autonomy Revolution

Rebellion Ventures—The Autonomy Fund—is a seed and pre-seed VC firm in Silicon Valley at the forefront of the Autonomy Revolution. We back founders building autonomous operations and systems that transform essential industries, including manufacturing and industrial operations, supply chain and logistics, physical infrastructure, commerce and trade, healthcare, and financial services. These systems sense, decide, act, and learn—performing work, driving outcomes, and unlocking step-change performance. Our portfolio benefits from proprietary autonomy research, an Operator LP community of 70+ unicorn founders, CEOs, and operators, and a GP track record of multi-billion-dollar exits.

Rebellion Ventures leadership illustration
Dr. Jukka Alanen

Dr. Jukka Alanen

Founder & Managing Partner

Jukka is the Founder and Managing Partner of Rebellion Ventures and an early pioneer and specialist VC in autonomous operations & systems, with 40+ autonomy investments. He brings 20+ years of senior operating experience, having helped build three VC-backed startups to $3.5B in IPO and M&A exits. His work combines this operating and investment experience with doctoral research on how innovators create and disrupt markets in the era of AI.

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Dr. Jukka Alanen

Jukka is the Founder and Managing Partner of Rebellion Ventures and an early pioneer and specialist VC in autonomous operations & systems, with 40+ autonomy investments. He brings 20+ years of senior operating experience, having helped build three VC-backed startups to $3.5B in IPO and M&A exits. His work combines this operating and investment experience with doctoral research on how innovators create and disrupt markets in the era of AI.

Before founding Rebellion, Jukka was SVP of Strategy and Corporate Development at PagerDuty, where he helped lead the company to a successful IPO and drove its growth to market leadership in digital operations, AI, and process automation.

Jukka has advised CEOs and executive teams of early-stage startups and global software companies on growth, expansion, and disruptive innovation. He has led 500+ partnerships and 30+ M&A deals valued at more than $5 billion. Prior to startups, Jukka served as VP at Symantec, where he led strategy, business development, alliances, M&A, and portfolio product management. Earlier, he was a management consultant at McKinsey & Company for over six years, leading strategic initiatives for software and technology clients.

Jukka earned a Doctor of Business Administration from Pepperdine University’s Graziadio Business School. His doctoral dissertation introduced new theory and practical insights on how innovators create and disrupt markets in the era of AI and beyond. He also holds two Master of Science degrees: one in Technology (Engineering), and one in Economics and Business Administration. In addition, he has completed executive programs at Stanford, UC Berkeley, and MIT.

Prof. Ramesh Raskar

Prof. Ramesh Raskar, MIT

Principal Scientist

As Rebellion’s Principal Scientist, Ramesh serves as a senior scientific and technical advisor. He is Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab and Associate Professor at MIT, specializing in autonomous, decentralized agentic AI systems, computer vision, and AI innovation. A prolific inventor with 125+ U.S. patents, he has translated groundbreaking research into startups and products as a serial AI entrepreneur and advisor.

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Prof. Ramesh Raskar, MIT

As Rebellion’s Principal Scientist, Ramesh serves as a senior scientific and technical advisor. He is Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab and Associate Professor at MIT, specializing in autonomous, decentralized agentic AI systems, computer vision, and AI innovation.

He leads Project NANDA, an industry-wide initiative to build the Internet of AI Agents, providing open, decentralized infrastructure for autonomous agents and agentic web at scale.

Beyond academia, Ramesh has worked on advanced research projects at Google X, Facebook, and Apple, and has co-founded and advised several startups.

He is a prolific inventor with over 125 U.S. patents, including automated machine learning (auto-ML), private ML (split learning), femto-photography (trillion fps imaging), cameras that see around corners, novel CAT-scan machines, motion capture, long-distance barcodes, and low-cost eye care devices.

His contributions have earned the Lemelson Award, ACM SIGGRAPH Achievement Award, TR100, Sloan Fellowship, and DARPA Young Faculty Award. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN, BBC, New Scientist, and MIT Technology Review.

Rebellion Research Fellows

The Rebellion Research Fellows Program brings together leading researchers who serve as external scientific advisors and collaborators. Their expertise spans robotics and physical AI, foundation models, and agentic systems. Research Fellows bring research insight and technical perspective, helping bridge frontier research with Rebellion’s practical insights from leading-edge startups.

Prof. Maxim Likhachev

Prof. Maxim Likhachev, Carnegie Mellon University

Professor at the CMU Robotics Institute and National Robotics Engineering Center, leading research on real-time planning and decision-making for autonomous robotic systems operating in complex, real-world environments. Profile

Prof. Sewon Min

Prof. Sewon Min, UC Berkeley

Assistant Professor at UC Berkeley EECS and a Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI, leading research on NLP, foundation models, LLMs, reasoning, reinforcement learning, and agentic systems relevant to autonomous operations and systems. Profile

Prof. Dhruv Shah

Prof. Dhruv Shah, Princeton University

Assistant Professor at Princeton University, leader of the Robotic Intelligence and Systems group, and formerly a co-lead of Gemini Robotics at Google DeepMind, with research focused on embodied AI, robot learning and foundation models (e.g., VLAs, world models), dexterous manipulation and robotic hardware, multi-agent and human–robot interaction, and autonomous improvement at scale. Profile

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Rebellion Operator LP & Advisor Community

The Rebellion Operator LP & Advisor Community includes 70+ unicorn founders, CEOs, operating executives, and industry experts who are LPs. Many have built and scaled category-defining companies and high-performing operations and can bring their experience and insights to Rebellion and our autonomy-native portfolio companies. The community also supports sourcing and evaluation through company introductions and domain insight into markets, customers, products, and industry dynamics. The community spans founders and leaders from frontier startups as well as senior operators from leading tech and industrial companies.

  • Strategic guidance: help founders move faster, scale better, and avoid costly mistakes.
  • Company-building: experienced input across go-to-market, product, engineering/AI, people, finance, and operations.
  • Industry relationships: connections to customers, partners, and talent where there is mutual fit.
  • Leadership support: potential advisors, coaches, and independent board members.