Vinod Khosla is an Indian-American businessman and venture capitalist. He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures. Khosla made his wealth from early venture capital investments in areas such as networking, software, and alternative energy technologies. He is considered one of the most successful and influential venture capitalists.
Venture capital is a form of private equity financing that is provided by venture capital firms or funds to startups, early-stage, and emerging companies that have been deemed to have high growth potential or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the companies they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Jason McCabe Calacanis is an American Internet entrepreneur, angel investor, author and podcaster.
Bialik College is a private comprehensive co-educational early learning, primary and secondary Jewish day school, located in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia. Established in 1942 in Carlton North, Victoria, the school has had a Zionist orientation since its inception, with the establishment of the State of Israel central to its identity. Bialik's approach to Judaism is pluralistic and cross-communal.
Powerset was an American company based in San Francisco, California, that, in 2006, was developing a natural language search engine for the Internet. On July 1, 2008, Powerset was acquired by Microsoft for an estimated $100 million.
Anthony Joseph Pratt, an Australian businessman and billionaire, is the executive chairman of Visy Industries, the world's largest privately owned packaging and paper company. He is the heir of Richard Pratt, who was a manufacturing magnate and president of the Carlton Football Club.
Nicholas Gruen is a prominent Australian economist and commentator on economic reform, innovation and the CEO of Lateral Economics. He is a visiting professor at King's College London's Policy Institute. He was formerly chair of the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, the Australian Government's Innovation Australia and Kaggle. Former Australian Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner called him "Australia's foremost public intellectual" while Martin Wolf described him as "the most brilliant economist you've never heard of".
Figure Eight was a human-in-the-loop machine learning and artificial intelligence company based in San Francisco.
Andreessen Horowitz is a private American venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of April 2023, Andreessen Horowitz ranks first on the list of venture capital firms by assets under management.
Kaggle is a data science competition platform and online community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners under Google LLC. Kaggle enables users to find and publish datasets, explore and build models in a web-based data science environment, work with other data scientists and machine learning engineers, and enter competitions to solve data science challenges.
SocialFlow is a social media optimization platform for brands and publishers. The company uses data from Twitter firehose, proprietary algorithms, and a link proxy to try and improve the delivery of messages on social networks. The company's analysis and data visualization of the way news filtered out around the death of Osama bin Laden via Twitter received international news coverage and led to questions about the role of Twitter in journalism.
Jeremy Howard is an Australian data scientist, entrepreneur, and educator.
Nicholas D'Aloisio is a British computer programmer and internet entrepreneur. He is the founder of Summly, a mobile app which automatically summarises news articles and other material, which was acquired by Yahoo for $30M, according to allthingsd.com, but the price wasn't officially disclosed. D'Aloisio is the youngest person to receive a round of venture capital in technology, at the age of 16. D'Aloisio was more recently the founder of a startup called Sphere that was acquired by Twitter in October 2021 for an undisclosed sum, and received $30M of venture capital investment from Index Ventures and Mike Moritz. He is also a student at Oxford University, where he graduated from the BPhil in Philosophy in July 2021 and now is undertaking the PhD (DPhil) course. D'Aloisio has had seven papers accepted for publication or revision & resubmission in peer-reviewed journals.
Scanadu was a Silicon Valley-based company that developed new medical devices from 2011 to 2016. In June 2020, after relaunching under the name inui Health, it was acquired by the Israeli healthcare startup Healthy.io.
Neil Rimer is a Swiss-Canadian venture capitalist who is the founding partner at Index Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in Europe, the United States, and Israel. He is also the co-chair of the board of directors at Human Rights Watch.
OurCrowd is an online global venture investing platform that empowers institutions and individual accredited investors to invest and engage in emerging technology companies at an early stage while still privately held. Based in Jerusalem, the company launched in February 2013, and has since opened overseas branches in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Spain, Singapore, Brazil, and the UAE.
Two Sigma Investments, LP is a New York City-based hedge fund that uses a variety of technological methods, including artificial intelligence, machine learning, and distributed computing, for its trading strategies. The firm is run by John Overdeck and David Siegel.
Alteryx is an American computer software company based in Irvine, California, with a development center in Broomfield, Colorado, and offices worldwide. The company's products are used for data science and analytics. The software is designed to make advanced analytics automation accessible to any data worker.
Fintech, a portmanteau of "financial technology", refers to firms using new technology to compete with traditional financial methods in the delivery of financial services. Artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud computing, and big data are regarded as the "ABCD" of fintech. The use of smartphones for mobile banking, investing, borrowing services, and cryptocurrency are examples of technologies designed to make financial services more accessible to the general public. Fintech companies consist of both startups and established financial institutions and technology companies trying to replace or enhance the usage of financial services provided by existing financial companies.
HomeLight is a real estate technology company founded in San Francisco, CA and based in Scottsdale, AZ.
