LiquiGlide is a platform technology which creates slippery, liquid-impregnated surfaces that was developed at the Varanasi Research Group at Massachusetts Institute of Technology by Prof. Kripa Varanasi and his team of students and post doctorals Dave Smith, Rajeev Dhiman, Adam Paxson, Brian Solomon, and Chris Love. [1] [2] Possible applications include improving the flow rate of condiment bottles to avoid food waste, and preventing clogs in gas and oil tubes. [1] [3] The project came in second place in the Business Plan Contest and won the Audience Choice Award at the 2012 MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. [1] As of January 2017, the company had raised $25M from investors including Roadmap Capital, Structure Capital, Valia Investments, and Struck Capital. [4]
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American businessman and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser with a graphical user interface; co-founder of Netscape; and co-founder and general partner of Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and later sold the software company Opsware to Hewlett-Packard. Andreessen is also a co-founder of Ning, a company that provides a platform for social networking websites and an inductee in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame. Andreessen's net-worth is estimated at $1.7 billion. Critics of Andreessen allege he displayed a conflict of interest by effectively negotiating against Facebook shareholders.
Y Combinator Management, LLC (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005 which has been used to launch more than 4,000 companies. The accelerator program started in Boston and Mountain View, expanded to San Francisco in 2019, and was entirely online during the COVID-19 pandemic. Companies started via Y Combinator include Airbnb, Coinbase, Cruise, DoorDash, Dropbox, Instacart, Reddit, Stripe, and Twitch.
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.
Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with dual headquarters in San Francisco and London, investing in technology-enabled companies with a focus on e-commerce, fintech, mobility, gaming, infrastructure/AI, and security. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has invested in a number of companies and raised approximately $5.6 billion. Index Venture partners appear frequently on Forbes’ Midas List of the top tech investors in Europe and Israel.
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.
Samuel Harris Altman is an American entrepreneur, investor, and programmer. He is the CEO of OpenAI and was the co-founder of Loopt. He previously was the president of Y Combinator and was briefly the CEO of Reddit.
MassChallenge is a global, zero-equity startup accelerator, founded in Boston, Massachusetts in 2009.
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.
The MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition is a student-managed business plan competition, where undergraduates and postgraduates from various programs and all levels at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) organize and enter the competition. Teams must include at least one full-time MIT student, but membership is not limited to the MIT community. The competition is supported by the MIT Entrepreneurship Center at the MIT Sloan School of Management. Every year a total of $300,000 is distributed as non-dilutive grant money. Since 1990, over 160 companies have been started as a result of the competition, generating 4,600 jobs, receiving over $1.3 billion in follow-up venture capital funding and totaling a cumulative market value of over $15 billion.
Michelangelo "Mike" Volpi is an Italian-American businessman and venture capitalist.
Stripe, Inc. is an Irish-American multinational financial services and software as a service (SaaS) company dual-headquartered in South San Francisco, California, United States and Dublin, Ireland. The company primarily offers payment-processing software and application programming interfaces for e-commerce websites and mobile applications.
Daniel Simon Aegerter is a Swiss businessman and venture capitalist. Formerly founder and CEO of Tradex Technologies, he later founded Armada Investment AG to manage his wealth. He was an early investor in Nutmeg (company), N26, Lilium GmbH, and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.
AngelList is a U.S. website for fundraising and connecting startups, angel investors, and limited partners. Founded in 2010, it started as an online introduction board for tech startups that needed seed funding. Since 2015, the site allows startups to raise money from angel investors free of charge. Created by serial entrepreneur Naval Ravikant and Babak Nivi in 2010, Avlok Kohli has been leading AngelList as its CEO since 2019.
Intel Capital is a division of Intel Corporation, set up to manage corporate venture capital, global investment, mergers and acquisitions. Intel Capital makes equity investments in a range of technology startups and companies offering hardware, software, and services targeting artificial intelligence, autonomous technology, data center and cloud, 5G, next-generation compute, semiconductor manufacturing and other technologies.
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.
Hugo Barra is a Brazilian computer scientist, technology executive and entrepreneur. From 2008 to 2013, he worked in a number of product management roles at Google, including vice president and product spokesperson of its Android division. From 2013 to 2017, he worked at Xiaomi as vice president of global operations. From 2017 to 2021, he worked as vice president of Virtual Reality and head of the Oculus division at Meta Platforms. In May 2021, he left Meta to start health technology startup Detect as CEO.
Aileen Lee is a U.S. venture capital angel investor and co-founder of Cowboy Ventures.
Crashlytics was a Boston, Massachusetts-based software company founded in May 2011 by entrepreneurs Wayne Chang and Jeff Seibert. Crashlytics helps collecting, analyzing and organizing app crash reports.
Plated was an American ingredient-and-recipe meal kit service that has been acquired by Albertsons. The company was founded in 2012 and became well known through its participation in Techstars in 2013, Shark Tank in 2014 and Beyond the Tank in 2015. Plated's founders, Nick Taranto and Josh Hix, earned a deal on Shark Tank that fell through, but negotiated a deal with another investor after the show was filmed. The company accepted several rounds of venture capital investments and remained private until it was acquired by Albertsons in September 2017.
DN Capital is an international venture capital firm headquartered in London that invests in technology companies. It was founded in 2000 by Nenad Marovac and Steve Schlenker, two Harvard Business School classmates.