Victor Lazarte

Who they are

Victor Lazarte is a self-employed investor and entrepreneur in San Francisco — board member at HeyGen, Decart, and Applied Compute, with prior board seat and lead Series A investment at Mercor.

Person

Victor studied simultaneously at Universidade de São Paulo (USP) and CentraleSupélec, completing dual engineering degrees by 2009 — a Brazilian-French academic track that signals early international orientation. His career arc moved through investing and operating roles before he went independent in August 2025, now running a self-directed portfolio of board seats across AI infrastructure and frontier companies. His active board positions span HeyGen (since April 2024), Decart (since November 2024), Applied Compute (since September 2025), and a concluded engagement at Mercor where he was both lead Series A investor and board member from June 2024 through August 2025. The through-line is early conviction in AI-adjacent infrastructure — real-time video generation, AI compute, and AI hiring — placed at the board level before these categories became obvious. Possibly — the move to self-employment in mid-2025 reflects a deliberate shift from institutional investing to backing a concentrated set of companies directly.

Network

No direct edge data is available from the network probe. His board seats at HeyGen, Decart, Mercor, and Applied Compute place him in the same rooms as their founding teams and co-investors, but no specific named co-investors or executives are surfaced in the claims.

How they likely show up

  • Board seats at HeyGen (April 2024), Decart (November 2024), and Applied Compute (September 2025) — all initiated within roughly 18 months — suggest he moves fast when he has conviction, not a slow due-diligence style.
  • Lead Series A investor and board member at Mercor simultaneously → he doesn't just write checks; he takes a governance seat and gets close to company operations.
  • Dual undergraduate degrees from USP and CentraleSupélec completed concurrently → high tolerance for parallel workloads and structured complexity.
  • Transition to self-employment in August 2025 after an institutional investing track → likely values autonomy and directness over committee-driven processes.
  • Possibly — concentration across AI video (HeyGen), AI compute (Applied Compute), and AI-native infrastructure (Decart) suggests a portfolio thesis rather than opportunistic deal flow.

Conversation tips

  • → Come in with a specific view on one of his portfolio companies — HeyGen, Decart, or Applied Compute — rather than a general AI pitch. He is clearly thesis-driven across these bets.
  • → Ask about the Mercor board tenure specifically: he was lead Series A investor and board member, then rolled off in August 2025 — there's a story there worth drawing out.
  • → He has no visible public writing signal, so don't reference blog posts or tweets; the relationship is built in the room, not via content.
  • → His Brazilian-French educational background and US base suggest comfort with cross-border contexts — if your conversation has an international angle, lean into it.

Toolbox

Openers

  • Open on Applied Compute — he joined the board in September 2025, which makes it his most recent bet and likely where his attention is sharpest right now.
  • Reference the Mercor board seat: he was lead Series A investor and board member from June 2024 through August 2025 — a completed arc that gives him a full view of what early-stage AI hiring companies actually look like under the hood.
  • Note the HeyGen board seat (April 2024) — he got in early on real-time AI video generation before it became a crowded category, which tells you something about how he reads markets.

Discovery questions

  1. You've backed companies across AI video, AI compute, and AI hiring — is there a single infrastructure bet underneath all three, or are these independent thesis calls?
  2. After leading the Series A at Mercor and rolling off the board in August 2025, what did you learn about what early-stage AI companies actually need from a board member versus a check writer?
  3. Going self-employed in August 2025 rather than raising a fund — what does that structure let you do that institutional investing wouldn't?

Avoid

Don't treat him as a generalist investor — his board seats are concentrated and deliberate across AI infrastructure themes, so generic pitches outside that space will land flat.

Make it yours

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Sources

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Generated by briefthecall.com from public web sources on June 5, 2026. Each claim is linked to its source above.

Automatically generated by AI from public sources. May be inaccurate or out of date. Remove or correct this profile →