Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing provided by firms or funds to startup, early-stage, and emerging companies, that have been deemed to have high growth potential or that have demonstrated high growth in terms of number of employees, annual revenue, scale of operations, etc. 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 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. Start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and often come from high technology industries such as information technology (IT) or biotechnology.
The Instituto Superior Técnico is the school of engineering and technology of the University of Lisbon. It was founded as an autonomous school in 1911, and was integrated into the Technical University of Lisbon in 1930. IST is the largest school of engineering in Portugal by number of enrolled students, faculty size, scientific production and patents.
Sequoia Capital Operations, LLC is an American venture capital firm headquartered in Menlo Park, California which specializes in seed stage, early stage, and growth stage investments in private companies across technology sectors. As of 2022, the firm had approximately US$85 billion in assets under management.
OutSystems is a low-code development platform which provides tools for companies to develop, deploy and manage omnichannel enterprise applications.
Stephan Morais is a Portuguese British investor.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a global venture capital firm focusing on seed stage, early stage investments and growth stage investments in the enterprise, fintech, consumer and healthcare sectors. Lightspeed has eleven offices globally and as of 2023 had approximately US$25 billion in assets under management.
FirstMark is a venture capital firm based in New York City. FirstMark invests in early-stage technology companies, frequently as the first institutional investor and leading the rounds it participates in. Notable investments include Pinterest, Shopify, DraftKings, Stubhub, Airbnb, Upwork, Riot Games, and Frame.io.
In business, a unicorn is a startup company valued at over US$1 billion which is privately owned and not listed on a share market. The term was first published in 2013, coined by venture capitalist Aileen Lee, choosing the mythical animal to represent the statistical rarity of such successful ventures.
Aileen Lee is a U.S. venture capital angel investor and co-founder of Cowboy Ventures.
Mark Tluszcz is an American businessman and venture capitalist who is co-founder and CEO of Mangrove Capital Partners, a venture capital firm he set up in 2000. He also serves as Chairman of Wix.com (NASDAQ:WIX), a popular website building platform. His achievements include turning a $2m investment in Skype into $200m and a $8m investment in Wix.com into $700m.
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.
Lowercase Capital was an American venture capital firm that provided seed and early-stage funding for several successful startups, including Twitter, Twilio, Kickstarter, Uber, Instagram, and Stripe. It raised over $1 billion in capital, and sources claim a return of at least $5 billion to its investors. In 2017 Chris Sacca closed the fund for new start-up investments to focus on climate action and politics. He said, however, that Lowercase Capital would continue to support the existing portfolio of investments.
Unbabel is an artificial intelligence-powered human translation platform. The company has headquarters in Lisbon, Portugal, and San Francisco, California.
Initialized Capital is a venture capital fund founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco. It was founded by Alexis Ohanian, Harjeet Taggar, and Garry Tan.
Collaborative Fund is a venture capital firm that provides seed and early stage funding to consumer industry and climate technology companies.
Pitango VC, established in 1993, is Israel's largest venture capital fund with over $2.8 billion under management. Pitango VC invests through three dedicated funds, Pitango First, Pitango HealthTech, and Pitango Growth. Pitango invests in startups around the world, in domains such as Vertical SaaS, Digital Health, Deep Tech, FinTech & InsureTech, Devops, Generative AI, Web3, and FoodTech.
DCM (also known as DCM Ventures) is a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley, Tokyo and Beijing. DCM was one of the first venture capital firms to invest in the early-stage technology sector in China, beginning in 1999.
Yadin B. Kaufmann is an Israeli-American technology investor, social entrepreneur and writer.
Harry Stebbings is a British venture capitalist known for starting "The Twenty Minute VC" podcast. In 2020, he launched his own venture capital fund called 20VC. He is a recipient of the Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe list recognition.
Robert (Rob) Kniaz is an American venture capitalist based in London. He is a founding partner of H-Tree Capital, a VC firm investing in deep tech and bio/healthcare, and was formerly a partner of Hoxton Ventures, an early-stage investment venture capital firm. Previously, he worked at Google as a product manager for AdSense.
