Venture capital (VC) is a form of private equity financing that is provided by firms or funds to startup, 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.
Social venture capital is a form of investment funding that is usually funded by a group of social venture capitalists or an impact investor to provide seed-funding investment, usually in a for-profit social enterprise, in return to achieve an outsized gain in financial return while delivering social impact to the world. There are various organizations, such as Venture Philanthropy (VP) companies and nonprofit organizations, that deploy a simple venture capital strategy model to fund nonprofit events, social enterprises, or activities that deliver a high social impact or a strong social causes for their existence. There are also regionally focused organizations that target a specific region of the world, to help build and support the local community in a social cause.
Norwest Venture Partners (Norwest) is an American venture and growth equity investment firm. The firm targets early to late-stage venture and growth equity investments across several sectors, including cloud computing and information technology, Internet, SaaS, business and financial services, and healthcare. Headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Norwest has offices in San Francisco and subsidiaries in Mumbai, India and Tel Aviv, Israel. The firm has funded more than 650 companies since inception.
Insight Partners is a global venture capital and private equity firm that invests in high-growth technology, software, and Internet businesses. The company is headquartered in New York City, with offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Palo Alto.
PGIM, Inc. (PGIM), formerly known as Prudential Investment Management, functions as the asset management arm of Prudential Financial, an American life insurance company.
Donald R. Katz is the founder of Audible, Inc. Founded in 1995 and headquartered in Newark, New Jersey, Audible.com serves millions of listeners and offers over 800,000 downloadable audiobooks, Audible Originals and podcasts. Audible also commercialized the first portable digital audio player in 1997, four years before the introduction of the iPod. In 2004, Katz was awarded the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for New Jersey. Audible was a publicly traded Nasdaq company until it was acquired and became a subsidiary of Amazon.com in early 2008. Audible operates digital storefronts in the US, UK, Germany, France, Australia, Italy, Japan, Canada, India and Spain.
Greycroft is an American venture capital firm. It manages over $2 billion in capital with investments in companies such as Bird, Bumble, HuffPost, Goop, Scopely, The RealReal, and Venmo. Greycroft was founded in 2006 by Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow. The firm is headquartered in New York City and Los Angeles.
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.
500 Global is an early-stage venture fund and seed accelerator founded in 2010 by Dave McClure and Christine Tsai. The fund admitted a first "class" of twelve startups to its incubator office in Mountain View, California in February 2011. They expanded to a second class of 21 in June 2011 and a third class of 34 in October 2011.
One Washington Park is a high rise office building located on Harriet Tubman Square at 1 Washington Street in Newark, New Jersey. Among the tallest buildings in the city, it is best known as the home of Rutgers Business School, Amazon's Audible.com, and Newark Venture Partners.
SOSV is a venture capital firm that provides pre-seed, seed, venture and growth stage funding to startups in the technology sector. The company conducts seed accelerator programs in Asia and the United States of America.
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.
Vinay Nair is a serial entrepreneur and academic. He is involved as an advisor or board member in several companies in financial services, across investment management, venture capital and fintech. He is also involved in technology-enabled solutions that link Israel, India and the US. He is the founder and chairman of TIFIN, a platform to create and manage a portfolio of fintech brands and companies in areas of investments, wealth management and asset management, as well as founder and chairman of 55ip, a fintech firm with offices in Boston and Mumbai, India. Nair was a visiting professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
Silverton Partners is an early-stage venture capital firm headquartered in Austin, Texas.
H2 Ventures is a fintech, data and artificial intelligence focused venture capital investment firm based in Sydney, Australia. It runs the H2 Startup Accelerator. H2 Ventures is located in the NSW Government backed Sydney Startup Hub.
Quest Ventures is a venture capital firm founded in 2011 by James Tan and Wang Yunming in Beijing, China. The firm mainly focuses on digital commerce investments and has an office in Singapore. The firm deploys funds across Asia in countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Indonesia. Quest Ventures is also the largest anchor tenant at JTC Launchpad.
Norrsken Foundation is a non-profit, non-religious and non-partisan foundation dedicated to helping entrepreneurs solve the world’s greatest challenges, such as poverty, famine, mental health, pollution and climate change. It has raised several venture capital funds, manages an accelerator program for early-stage startups and operates co-working spaces in Stockholm, Sweden and Kigali, Rwanda. Norrsken was created by Niklas Adalberth, one of the founders of the fintech company Klarna.
Venture capital in Poland is a segment of the private equity market that finances early-stage high-risk companies based in Poland, with the potential for fast growth. As of March 2019, there is a total of 130 active VC firms in Poland, including local offices of international VC firms, and VC firms with mainly Polish management teams. Between 2009–2019, these entities have invested locally in over 750 companies, which gives an average of around 9 companies per portfolio. The Polish venture market accounts for 3% of the entire European ecosystem of VC investments, mainly in the digital space.
TAU Ventures is a venture capital firm investing in early state startups in Israel. It was founded in 2018 by Tel Aviv University and Nimrod Cohen, and is headquartered in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Janet Bannister is a Canadian business executive and venture capitalist.
