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.
In-Q-Tel (IQT), formerly Peleus and In-Q-It, is an American not-for-profit venture capital firm based in Arlington, Virginia. It invests in companies to keep the Central Intelligence Agency, and other intelligence agencies, equipped with the latest in information technology in support of United States intelligence capability. The name "In-Q-Tel" is an intentional reference to Q, the fictional inventor who supplies technology to James Bond.
Accel, formerly known as Accel Partners, is an American venture capital firm. Accel works with startups in seed, early and growth-stage investments. The company has offices in Palo Alto, California and San Francisco, California, with additional operating funds in London, India and China.
Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software.
Upserve, originally Swipely, provides a restaurant management platform which allows independent full-service restaurants to run and manage their entire business. The Platform is made up of restaurant-specific point of sale (POS) software, payments, and analytics, online ordering, loyalty, and marketing tools designed specifically for restaurants. At the center of the Upserve Platform is the cloud-based Upserve POS, a point of sale system that Upserve acquired from Groupon in 2016.
VMware Carbon Black is a cybersecurity company based in Waltham, Massachusetts. The company develops cloud-native endpoint security software that is designed to detect malicious behavior and to help prevent malicious files from attacking an organization. The company leverages technology known as the Predictive Security Cloud (PSC), a big data and analytics cloud platform that analyzes customers’ unfiltered data for threats.
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.
Anaplan is a business planning software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. Anaplan sells subscriptions for cloud-based business-planning software and provides data for decision-making purposes.
Twilio is an American company based in San Francisco, California, which provides programmable communication tools for making and receiving phone calls, sending and receiving text messages, and performing other communication functions using its web service APIs.
Silk is a technology company headquartered in Needham, Massachusetts, United States. Silk offers a cloud platform for enterprise customers with mission-critical applications. The company has offices in Boston and Israel.
Zendesk, Inc. is a Danish-American company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides software-as-a-service products related to customer support, sales, and other customer communications. The company was founded in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2007. Zendesk raised about $86 million in venture capital investments before going public in 2014.
Spark Capital is a venture capital firm in the United States, responsible for early-stage funding startups of consumer, commerce, FinTech, software, frontier, and media sectors. It has branches in San Francisco, Boston, and New York City.
Databricks, Inc. is an American software company founded by the creators of Apache Spark. Databricks develops a web-based platform for working with Spark, that provides automated cluster management and IPython-style notebooks. The company develops Delta Lake, an open-source project to bring reliability to data lakes for machine learning and other data science use cases.
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.
Fuze is a cloud communications and collaboration software platform designed for the enterprise. Fuze was acquired by 8x8. The company is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts.
Sapphire Ventures is a venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, San Francisco, Austin, and London. The firm is considered one of the world's premier venture capital firms.
Uniphore is a conversational automation technology company. Uniphore sells software for conversational analytics, conversational assistants and conversational security. The company is headquartered in Palo Alto, California, with offices in the United States, Singapore, India, Japan, Spain, and Israel. Its products help up to 75,000 customer service agents during approximately 160 million interactions per month.
Whatfix is a SaaS based digital adoption platform that provides organizations with a no-code editor to create in-app guidance and self-help support on any application that looks 100% native. The platform enables companies to create interactive walkthroughs, product tours, user onboarding checklists, smart tips, field validation, self-help wikis, hotspots, and more. Its advanced product analytics empower organizations with the data to understand how users are engaging with their applications and software products.
BitSight is a cybersecurity ratings company that analyzes companies, government agencies, and educational institutions. It is based in Back Bay, Boston. Security ratings that are delivered by BitSight are used by banks and insurance companies among other organizations. The company rates more than 200,000 organizations with respect to their cybersecurity.
CB Insights is a private company with a business analytics platform and global database that provides market intelligence on private companies and investor activities. The platform is targeted at private equity, venture capital, investment banking, angel investing, and consulting professionals by providing insights about high growth private companies.
