Moritz Baier-Lentz
Moritz Baier-Lentz is a German-American venture capitalist. He is a partner and the head of gaming & interactive media at Lightspeed Venture Partners, leading the firm's investments in gaming and artificial intelligence, including foundation models for spatiotemporal reasoning, as well as applications for generative media creation and agentic simulations in video games.
Previously, Baier-Lentz was a vice president in the investment banking division of Goldman Sachs, where he founded and led the firm's gaming practice.
Early life and education
Baier-Lentz grew up as a first-generation high school graduate in rural Germany and spent his teenage years competitively playing Blizzard Entertainment's multiplayer action role-playing game Diablo II. He used a combination of proceeds from virtual goods sales and German national academic merit scholarships from Studienstiftung and DAAD to help finance his undergraduate and graduate studies.Awards and professional memberships
In 2016 and 2017, Baier-Lentz was regarded by Forbes and Capital as one of the most influential finance professionals in their 30 Under 30 and 40 Under 40 lists, respectively. In 2017, he joined the German-American Atlantik-Brücke and in 2023, he was recognized as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and invited to participate as a delegate in the 54th and 55th Annual Meeting in Davos. Baier-Lentz holds an MBA and M.A. from Stanford University, and graduated as an Arjay Miller Scholar.Career
Investment banking
After starting his career as a data scientist at IBM, Baier-Lentz joined Goldman Sachs as an investment banker, and founded and led the firm's global gaming practice.During his tenure as vice president, he advised gaming and technology corporations on over $300 billion in transaction volume across mergers and acquisitions, initial public offerings, venture capital, and other strategic transactions, including Dell's $67 billion acquisition of EMC and IBM's $34 billion purchase of Red Hat.
Venture capital
BITKRAFT Ventures
Baier-Lentz went on to become a partner and management team member at BITKRAFT Ventures, where he invested into entrepreneurs who had led the creation of video games like Fortnite, Call of Duty, League of Legends, Halo, Destiny, Overwatch, Valorant, Apex Legends, Sky, StarCraft II, and Warcraft III.He scaled the firm to approximately $850 million in assets under management and to become the most active gaming lead investor in 2020, 2021, and 2022 before joining Lightspeed.
Lightspeed Venture Partners
After setting up Lightspeed's gaming and interactive media practice in early 2023, Baier-Lentz elevated the firm to become the largest set of funds with a dedicated sector focus.In 2023 and 2024, Lightspeed has been the leading venture capital investor in gaming and interactive media globally; having led rounds of aggregated $162 million and $252 million across both years, respectively.
General Intuition
Baier-Lentz is a founding member of General Intuition, a frontier research lab building action policies and world models trained on proprietary video game data. In 2025, the startup raised a $133.7M Seed round led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst, after rumored to be walking away from a $500 million acquisition offer from OpenAI in 2024.Gaming industry
CEO Forum and Lightspeed Advisory Council
Baier-Lentz hosts the annual CEO Forum at the Game Developers Conference with Goldman Sachs, McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, and Sony—an "off-the-record gathering for the CEOs of the world's largest gaming and interactive media companies."Attendees of the 2024 and 2025 conferences have included executives from companies such as Microsoft, Roblox, and Sony.
Game Theory
In June 2025, Baier-Lentz launched the video podcast series Game Theory: How Play Is Changing Everything in partnership with Goldman Sachs and McKinsey, featuring commentary from founders, CEOs, and presidents in the gaming industry on how the concept of play has shaped consumer behavior and technological innovation.Episode overview