Nathan Owen

Nathan Owen is a General Partner at Grand Ventures, where he leads the firm’s investments in devops, developer tools and infrastructure software. He spent 20 years building and selling enterprise software companies before becoming an investor, and he backs founders working on problems he has had to solve himself: observability, data infrastructure, and taking open-source products to market.

Since joining Grand in 2021, Nathan has invested in companies including Tembo, Traceloop (acquired by ServiceNow), Payload (acquired by Figma), Comp AI, Scorbit, Devplan and OllyGarden. He writes regularly about open-source and observability investing.

Across his operating career, Nathan raised more than $120 million in venture funding for the companies he helped lead. He co-founded Blue Medora and led it as CEO for 12 years, raising more than $30 million, growing it to about $20 million in revenue and selling its VMware-focused business unit to VMware in 2020. He also co-founded Bindplane and served as its CEO in the early days before handing the role to his CTO, Mike Kelly, and he stayed on the board through its acquisition by Dynatrace in April 2026.

As COO and CRO of HYCU, a Boston-based backup-as-a-service company, Nathan grew sales 450% year over year and led the company through Bain Capital’s $87.5 million investment in 2021. Earlier, he co-founded OctetString (acquired by Oracle), where he was SVP of Sales, and spent four years at IBM as a Business Development Executive. He holds a Bachelor of Science from Central Michigan University.

A Yooper by birth, Nathan still spends as much time as he can in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. He is an over-the-top Green Bay Packers fan and, thanks to a single share of stock, a part-owner of the team. He is also an unabashed reader of post-apocalyptic and zombie fiction, tinkers with amateur electronics, and has beaten nearly every Souls-like game ever made. Ask him about the six months of his life he lost to Elden Ring.