Jaime Hernandez, Founder & General Partner

Jaime led a successful career as a corporate real estate executive at BMW, Shell, and Xerox prior to starting his career in venture capital.  Over a period of almost two decades, he orchestrated over $2B in office and industrial real estate transactions throughout the Americas, contributing directly to the operational and financial success of those companies.  This extensive background has cultivated a unique skill set crucial for venture capital success: the ability to identify lucrative opportunities, build high-performing teams, conduct thorough due diligence, identify and mitigate risks in complex business environments, and drive long-term value. 

Jaime launched his VC career in 2023 when he joined VU Venture Partners, a generalist, early-stage fund in San Francisco.  He rapidly immersed himself in the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem—establishing strong relationships with founders, fellow investors, LPs, accelerators, and venture studios. His passion for deeptech and medtech stems from the potential for high-impact innovations that can meaningfully improve people’s lives on a large scale, while offering significant upside for investors.

Before narrowing his focus to these emerging sectors, Jaime worked across various verticals — including proptech, fintech, and enterprise software — building a broad investment perspective that he applies to complex, high-growth opportunities in deeptech and medtech. He seeks to back visionary founders who are driven by audacious goals, believing that outlier returns are possible when breakthrough technologies meet the right blend of capital, strategy, and mentorship.

In his short tenure in venture capital, Jaime has primarily backed founders at the pre-Seed through Series A stages, but he has occasionally taken measured positions in growth-stage companies whose breakthrough technologies have already proven robust product–market fit and are on the verge of reshaping their sectors. These high-conviction investments complement his early-stage core by adding asymmetric upside potential without diluting portfolio discipline. Before founding Chimera Ventures, he was involved in the underwriting of, and subsequent investments in, the companies listed below, which are representative of his thesis and overall approach.