Benjamin Shi
Founder & General Partner
Benjamin holds a B.S. in Finance and a B.A. in International Studies and graduated early from the Huntsman Program at the University of Pennsylvania to build RL environments for frontier AI labs. He previously worked as a healthcare investor at General Atlantic and spent summers working in consumer growth equity at Sonoma Brands Capital and in global L/S equities at FACT Capital.
He backs exceptional founders as an investor for Parakletos Ventures.
Against mimesis
Parakletos (παράκλητος) is Koine Greek, translating directly as “the one called alongside to help.” In the Gospel of John it names the Spirit promised to the disciples as they went out to evangelize the world: it is the advocate, the helper, the comforter, and the counselor of the lost and the weary. The word also carries precise legal meaning, drawn from the same courtrooms in which Christ stood accused before the Pharisees: the lawyer for the defense, the defender of the accused. The one called to stand beside you when the crowd has already decided against you.
The name arrives by way of René Girard. Girard's lifework began with a single observation: desire is mimetic. We rarely want things on our own. We want what others want, because they want it. Left to run, imitation converges into fashion, into rivalry, and finally into the unanimous crowd closing in on one. In Girard's reading of the Gospels, the Paraclete is the power that tears people away from that contagion, the defender who breaks the crowd's unanimity and speaks for the accused.
No industry is more openly mimetic than venture capital. Hot rounds get hotter because they happen to already be hot. Conviction arrives downstream of consensus. The same thesis appears in every memo in the same quarter. Parakletos is built against that reflex: I underwrite my own beliefs, invest before consensus forms, and never outsource conviction to the crowd.
Founders live under the same pressure: the contagious pull to drift away from the core principles they believe in towards what others are unethically doing around them is powerful. As a founder myself, I understand the dangers of the start-up ecosystem and empathize strongly with founders going through challenges and set-backs on a constant basis. In the past, I've felt the dopamine-spiking highs of continual victories, only to subsequently lose everything afterwards. The only thing that kept me alive was having advocates, helpers, comforters, and counselors around me. That is why I back teams building from true belief, and that is why I will always defend your right to build it your way. The vision belongs solely to the founders.
How the fund runs
Pre-seed and seed, deliberately constructed. Fewer positions, entered with real conviction.
The portfolio concentrates where the new economy is being assembled: AI-native enterprises, frontier infrastructure, markets created rather than contested.
Parakletos pushes back, meticulously, against the constraints on human progress. We invest first in the infrastructure layer (energy, compute, data), then downstream in the deployment layer (space, robotics, agentic AI), where the stored potential energy of the human race turns kinetic. The fire has only just been lit.