The Manhattan Venture Partners cofounder has backed some of the biggest names in technology. He thinks the next wave creates an opening for places like Western New York.
Jared Carmel arrived at the University at Buffalo from Long Island in the late 1990s.
Carmel was young, needed money and eventually landed on what seemed like a pretty good idea: bring DJs into Broadway Joe’s on off nights and make some cash without having to work quite so hard.
It didn't quite work out that way.
The experience instead became an early education in marketing. Carmel parlayed that into an internship at Buffalo advertising agency Mower, began gravitating toward technology and eventually found his way into venture capital.
More than 25 years later, Carmel is cofounder and managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners, where he helped pioneer the secondary market for venture-backed technology companies. MVP's portfolio has included companies such as Airbnb, Anthropic, Coinbase, Databricks, Palantir, SpaceX and xAI.
The firm's All Star Fund V was recently ranked No. 1 by net IRR among venture funds under $500 million in Bloomberg's 2026 Private Funds League Tables. Carmel is now raising the firm's sixth fund.
And Buffalo?
Carmel met his wife here. He found his first professional footing here. He says it was the place where he first lived on his own and "basically became an adult.
He's watched from afar as the city changed.
Now, as venture capital rushes into artificial intelligence, robotics, defense and advanced manufacturing, Carmel thinks the things Western New York has always been good at might suddenly matter quite a bit.
Series B caught up with Carmel about his Buffalo years, the evolution of his career and why he thinks the region's next big technology opportunity may be built around atoms instead of bits.
This story is part of an ongoing series of profiles about prominent Buffalo expats doing great things in business and finance. Others include:
Mike Sullivan, cofounder of $7B OneDigital, wants to activate Buffalo’s expat diaspora
Brian Sacca keeps coming back to Buffalo
Let's start in Buffalo. How did you end up here?
I was born in Queens and grew up on Long Island and went to the University at Buffalo for undergrad. I didn't come from a finance family. My dad did electrical work and my mom was a guidance counselor in Brooklyn.
I had to work. I didn't really have a choice.
Necessity is the mother of invention, right? I had this idea that I could bring musical talent to Broadway Joe's that was different from what they were known for. I started bringing DJs up on off nights.
What I eventually realized was that the thing I was really learning was marketing. That led me to Mower, where I worked and interned for a few years. It gave me a much more process-oriented way to think about marketing, and from there I started getting more involved in technology.
And somehow that path leads from Broadway Joe's to venture capital?
Eventually.
I thought I was going to come back to New York and work on Wall Street. I ended up finding my way into venture capital at a time when people were still saying the internet was a fad.
I got my butt kicked in 2008 on investments I'd made in clean and green technology. But that eventually led me into the secondary market.
The first problem I started trying to solve was around stock options. People would leave these high-growth private companies with valuable options, but exercising them could require enormous amounts of capital and create enormous tax bills.
So we started creating liquidity solutions for those shareholders. That grew into a much bigger opportunity as companies started staying private longer.
And that became the foundation for Manhattan Venture Partners?
Yes. We started building solutions around the secondary market and eventually developed a strategy where we could invest in a company at the Series B, C or D stage and then use the secondary market to increase our position at a lower cost basis.
The secondary market is very different once you get outside the 20 biggest private companies. There's less competition for those common shares and often a very real need for liquidity.
That's where we've built our business.
Our first three funds were top-decile performers. Fund V recently ranked No. 1 by net IRR in its category in Bloomberg's 2026 Private Funds League Tables. We're now working on Fund VI.
We've been fortunate.
You've now had a front-row seat to several generations of technology companies. What does the market look like to you right now?
I live with this understanding that negativity sounds smart and positivity makes money.
But I also think this is one of the most difficult investing environments I've seen in my career. There are some amazing businesses being built, but valuations across the board have gotten incredibly expensive.
AI is a big part of that. Our firm has made significant investments there, including Anthropic, xAI and Cohere.
The technology is changing unbelievably quickly. My belief is that you're ultimately going to see significant commoditization at the model layer. Open-source and open-weight models are already nipping at the heels of some of these companies.
That doesn't mean you stop investing. You can't stop investing. But you have to think very carefully about where durable value is actually going to exist.
Where do you think some of that value is moving?
One thing I'm watching is the movement of some of the best technical talent into defense, aerospace, robotics and other hard-tech categories.
You see former Palantir engineers building companies. You see former SpaceX people doing the same thing. You see what's happening around places like Austin and Cape Canaveral.
And that's interesting for a place like Western New York. The next generation of important technology companies doesn't necessarily have to look like the last generation.
Why does that matter for Buffalo?
Because Buffalo already has a foundation for that kind of economy.
When you look at Western and Central New York, you have intelligent people, strong universities, existing industrial capabilities and a cost of living that is significantly better than the Bay Area or Austin.
I'd be thinking about Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse as a broader talent corridor.
How do you take the smartest people across that geography and create something that starts to look like its own version of Silicon Valley — except the housing is affordable and the companies may be building physical technology?
That's the opportunity I see.
So you're not suggesting Buffalo should try to recreate Silicon Valley?
No. I think that's exactly the wrong way to think about it.
Look at what's already there.
You have optics. You have aerospace. You have manufacturing expertise. You have semiconductor investment happening in the broader region. Companies bubble up from those existing pools of talent.
I've spent a lot of my career in hard tech — telecom, chips, clean technology, robotics, defense. One thing people consistently underestimate is how difficult manufacturing and supply chains are.
Everyone expects these businesses to scale like software. They don't.
You're seeing that problem firsthand in your portfolio?
Absolutely.
Take robotics. It's one thing to build a great robot. It's another thing entirely to manufacture the actuators, sensors and other components at enormous scale.
The United States doesn't have all of that supply chain in place today.
We've spent a lot of time in Monterrey, Mexico, because there is an extraordinary manufacturing ecosystem there. My preference is always to manufacture in the United States when we can, but until some of those capabilities mature, companies need other solutions.
That's why I keep coming back to this question of where the next manufacturing and hard-tech clusters can emerge.
And you think Western New York could be one of them?
I think it's a valid hypothesis.
Can you combine appropriately priced labor, appropriately priced real estate and a deep pool of intelligent people and get them focused on atoms instead of just bits and bytes?
Buffalo has some of those ingredients already.
The question is how you build on the foundation that's already there and create enough successful companies that the ecosystem starts becoming self-sustaining.
You've talked about the importance of getting more breakout companies in places like Buffalo. Why does that matter?
When you look at second- and third-tier startup communities, you need multiple success stories.
Buffalo has ACV. You need two or three more ACVs.
Success creates this splatter effect. People make money. Talented employees get experience. They start companies. They invest in other companies. More people see that they can build their careers there.
The challenge is keeping that talent from leaving once they become successful. That's still a hard problem.
How do you engage people who built careers elsewhere without expecting them to move back?
That's one of the questions I'm interested in.
How do you help without having to move back?
I don't know that I have the answer yet. But I think creating a stronger Buffalo-Rochester-Syracuse corridor starts to address it. You make the ecosystem bigger. You create more opportunities. You give people more reasons to stay and more ways for people who left to participate.
And the economics are increasingly in Buffalo's favor. The cost of living in the Bay Area is extraordinary. Austin isn't cheap anymore either.
That's a flag Buffalo should be waving.
You seem to have retained a pretty strong attachment to the place yourself. Why?
I feel like I grew up there.
It was the first time I was really out of my house. It's where I basically became an adult. I worked there. I had a good time there. I met my wife there.
I've tried to convince my daughter to go to UB. I told her the tuition looks a lot better than Clemson but she wasn't persuaded.
But Buffalo was more than a place where I spent four years and had a good time. It was where I was able to find myself. There's a lot of nostalgia around that for me.
What do you see when you come back now?
When I went there in the late '90s, Buffalo was pretty rusty.
I've been back several times, and the city has become amazing. It's incredibly underappreciated.
There's a great talent pool. There's infrastructure. There's affordability. There has been so much work over the last couple decades to rebuild and reinvigorate the place.
To me, it's a matter of when, rather than if, you see another renaissance across that broader region.
Western New York has done this before and there's no reason it can't do it again.
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