The Team

A deliberate pairing: venture capital meets federal workforce policy.

IndustriousAF is co-founded by a venture capitalist with a deep-tech engineering background and the former federal authority on registered apprenticeship. Workforce policy and frontier-tech sourcing live in separate worlds, and the problem IndustriousAF works on sits precisely where they should meet.

Ashwin Lalendran, co-founder of IndustriousAF
Co-founder · San Francisco

Ashwin Lalendran

Venture Capital×Hard Tech

Deep-tech investor and engineer. Has taken eight industrial AI systems from concept to production, and now backs and convenes the frontier manufacturers absent from industrial policy.

  • Background: Apple · Air Force Research Laboratory · NASA
  • Practice: Industrial capacity measurement, and scaling hard-tech companies
Brent Parton, co-founder of IndustriousAF
Co-founder · Washington DC

Brent Parton

Workforce Policy×Federal Systems

President of CareerWise. The policy and operational authority on registered apprenticeship in the United States, and the person who has spent the last decade scaling it.

  • Background: Acting Asst. Secretary of Labor, USDOL
  • Practice: Pilots, policy, and applied workforce research
Mckenzie Lock, Partner at IndustriousAF
Partner · San Francisco

Mckenzie Lock

AI×Product

Product executive from high-growth tech. Building IndustriousAF's first city programs and the founder network around them.

  • Background: Netflix · Affirm · Pinterest · LinkedIn
  • Practice: Shopfloor, and the founder network it convenes
Lucas Zurbuchen, 2026 Fellow at IndustriousAF
Fellow, 2026 · Zurich

Lucas Zurbuchen

AI×Industrial Data

Computer science master's student at ETH Zurich. Publishing IndustriousAF's first data artifacts.

  • Background: Northwestern, computer science · D ONE Value Creation · NASA
  • Practice: Natural language processing applied to industrial data
Further appointments