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 they are often from high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Openwave Systems Inc. is a division of Enea. It provides video traffic management and 5G mobile products.
Vignette Corporation was a company that offered a suite of content management, web portal, collaboration, document management, and records management software. Targeted at the enterprise market, Vignette offered products under the name StoryServer that allowed non-technical users to create, edit and track content through workflows and publish it on the web. It provided integration for enterprise resource planning, customer relationship management and legacy systems, supporting Java EE and Microsoft.NET. Vignette's integrated development environment and application programming interface offered an alternative to conventional Common Gateway Interface/vi/Perl web development. StoryServer was used on many large websites including those of CNET, UnitedHealth Group, The Walt Disney Company, Wachovia, Martha Stewart, Fox News, National Geographic Channel, Pharmacia & Upjohn, MetLife, BSkyB, the 2004 Summer Olympics, and NASA.
Penton was an information services and marketing company. The company's three largest revenue streams came from events, digital and marketing services. Although Penton had a long history as a trade publisher, in 2015 it reported that 35 percent of its EBITDA derived from digital products, 54 percent from events, and 11 percent from print. The main industry segments served by Penton include agriculture, transportation, natural products/food, infrastructure, and design and manufacturing.
Finjan Holdings (Finjan) is a company that focuses on the licensing of intellectual property. Finjan claims to own patented technology used in enterprise web security tools. Formerly a publicly traded company on NASDAQ (FNJN), it was acquired by the Fortress Investment Group in 2020.
Epicentric, Inc., was an enterprise software company and a provider of enterprise portal solutions for Global 2000 companies. Made popular by custom portal sites like My Yahoo!, enterprise portals enabled businesses to deliver integrated Web services to their customers (Internet), partners (Extranet) and employees (Intranet). The company was founded in 1998 by Wired.com executive Ed Anuff and TouchWave executive Oliver Muoto, both startup veterans, in San Francisco, California. The company had over 300 employees and 350 Global 2000 customers before it was acquired by Vignette (VIGN) in December 2002.
Ed Anuff is an entrepreneur and Head of Product at Datastax. Prior to Datastax, he was Vice President of Product Strategy at Apigee. He is the founder of cloud based service Usergrid. Prior to Usergrid, he served as Executive Vice President and GM, Platform Products and Services at Six Apart, Ltd.
Techstars is a pre-seed investor that provides access to capital, mentorship, and other support for early-stage entrepreneurs. It was founded in 2006 in Boulder, Colorado. As of January 2024, the company had accepted over 4,100 companies into its accelerator programs with a combined market capitalization of $106bn USD. Techstars operates accelerator programs in the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
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.
Fortumo was an Estonian company which developed a platform for digital service providers for user growth and monetization.
BATM Advanced Communications Ltd. is a technology company principally engaged in development, production and marketing of data and telecommunication products in the field of local and wide area networks, as well as the development, production and distribution of laboratory diagnostic equipment in the medical sector. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE techMARK 100 Index.
Belden is a global, publicly traded company specializing in the design, manufacture, and distribution of end-to-end networking, security and connectivity products. The company serves the Industrial Automation Solutions, Smart Buildings and Broadband & 5G markets.
LogicBoxes is a web products and consulting company that specialises in providing private labelled, web presence, and communication applications to ICANN Registrars, large web hosts, domain resellers, ISPs and telcos. In addition, it also offers to consult and a SaaS platform that provides end-to-end business automation to its clients.
Planview is a global enterprise software company headquartered in Austin, Texas.
Yury Melnichek is a tech-entrepreneur, venture investor and software engineer. He was born in Minsk (Belarus), lived in Switzerland for more than 16 years and now lives in Cyprus. He was the founder of the free cartographic service MapsWithMe, AIMATTER company and Vochi. In December 2021, together with Anna Melnichek, founded the investment company Melnichek Investments to invest in promising machine learning and biotech startups. Apart from investment activities, Yury provides consulting services in venture investment, mobile applications marketing, and also provides consultancy services for IT-companies and startups working with machine learning, computer vision and data science.
Jeff Binder is an American entrepreneur and the builder of several startups in the technology, media, and telecommunications sectors. He is the former executive vice president of home and entertainment at T-Mobile after the company bought Layer3 TV, the company Binder co-founded and served as the CEO of until the purchase for $325 million. Layer3's service and platform eventually became T-Mobile's "T-Vision" once its version was launched by the company. Jeff Binder was also the founding CEO of Broadbus Technologies and an early investor and chairman of This Technology, which were sold respectively to Motorola and Comcast. He is brothers with renowned television producer, Steven D. Binder.
Gili Raanan is an Israeli venture capitalist and one of the inventors of CAPTCHA, the WAF and many other inventions in the fields of Cybersecurity. Raanan started Sanctum in 1997, and rolled out the first Web application firewall AppShield and the first Web application penetration testing software AppScan. He later started NLayers which was acquired by EMC Corporation where he worked on the science of Application discovery and understanding. He was an investor and a General Partner at Sequoia Capital, the Founder of Cyberstarts, and is the first investor and board member at Wiz (company), Adallom, Armis Security, Onavo, Moovit, and Innovid (NYSE:CTV).
Sierra Ventures is an American venture capital firm based in San Mateo, California. It targets startups in sectors including enterprise tech, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and healthcare.
Jonathan Abrams is a Canadian engineer, entrepreneur, and investor. He is best known as the founder of Friendster where he worked from 2002 to 2005. He then founded Socializr, where he worked from 2005 to 2010, and Nuzzel, where he stayed from 2012 to 2018. He has invested in over 50 companies, including Docker and Instacart. He was the owner of a patent for a "System, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks". This, and Friendster's other patents, were bought by Facebook for $40 million in 2010.
Altair Capital, is an American venture capital company that was founded by Igor Ryabenkiy, a Russian serial angel investor.
