Parse cofounder and Y Combinator partner Ilya Sukhar joins Matrix Partners

Parse cofounder and Y Combinator partner Ilya Sukhar announced today that he has joined Matrix Partners as a general partner, where he’ll be investing in a variety of companies, but perhaps more so startups with an engineering bent that focus on “a durable mission.”

This is the latest step for Sukhar, who left Facebook in 2015 after the social networking company acquired the mobile developer backend that he started along with cofounders Tikhon Bernstam, Kevin Lacker, and James Yu in 2011. He had also been active with Y Combinator, the startup program Parse had been incubated in, since 2014 as a part-time partner.

Matrix Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California and has a $1.7 billion fund at its disposal — it’s already on its tenth fund. It specializes in enterprise, ecommerce, security, software as a service, advertising, media and entertainment, hardware, financial technology, and mobile startups. Among the more notable investments are Namely, Canva, and Quora. The firm also led the first round for Oculus VR and counts Apple, SanDisk, Aruba Networks, HubSpot, and Zendesk among its many wins.

Focusing on engineering solutions is something that suits Sukhar, especially for all the work he’s done not only at Parse, but also Facebook, and in his experience advising startups such as Gitlab, Clearbit, Airtable, and numerous others that have gone through the Y Combinator program.