Venture capital (VC) 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 firms 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.
Marc Lowell Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer. He is the co-author of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser; 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. He sits on the board of directors of Meta Platforms. Andreessen was one of six inductees in the World Wide Web Hall of Fame announced at the First International Conference on the World-Wide Web in 1994.
A joint venture (JV) is a business entity created by two or more parties, generally characterized by shared ownership, shared returns and risks, and shared governance. Companies typically pursue joint ventures for one of four reasons: to access a new market, particularly Emerging market; to gain scale efficiencies by combining assets and operations; to share risk for major investments or projects; or to access skills and capabilities. Work by Reuer and Leiblein challenged the claim that joint ventures minimize downside risk.
TPG Inc., previously known as Texas Pacific Group, is an American investment company. The private equity firm is focused on leveraged buyouts and growth capital. TPG manages investment funds in growth capital, venture capital, public equity, and debt investments. The firm invests in a range of industries including consumer/retail, media and telecommunications, industrials, technology, travel, leisure, and health care.
BrightSource Energy, Inc. is an Oakland, California based, corporation that designs, builds, finances, and operates utility-scale solar power plants.
Qumranet, Inc. was an enterprise software company offering a desktop virtualization platform based on hosted desktops in Kernel-based Virtual Machines (KVM) on servers, linked with their SPICE protocol. The company was also the creator, maintainer and global sponsor of the KVM open source hypervisor.
Alta Partners is a venture capital firm based in San Francisco which invests primarily in biotechnology and life science companies.
U.S. Venture Partners (USVP) is a venture capital investment firm specializing in early-stage ventures in enterprise software, cybersecurity, consumer, e-commerce, healthcare, and IT-enabled healthcare services. The venture capital partnership is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. Since its inception in 1981, USVP has invested over $3.9 billion across a wide range of sectors. Out of the 498 companies financed by USVP, 89 have completed an initial public offering.
Burr, Egan, Deleage & Co. (BEDCO) was a venture capital firm which focused on investments in information technology, communications, and healthcare/biotechnology companies.
Philip James is a British entrepreneur and adventurer living in California. He is currently CEO of Penrose Hill, a wine company based in Napa, California that sells through its website Firstleaf.com and through retail. He was also the founding CEO of both Lot18, a private sale site for wine and food, and Snooth, a comparison shopping internet site for wine.
Carfilzomib, sold under the brand name Kyprolis, is an anti-cancer medication acting as a selective proteasome inhibitor. Chemically, it is a tetrapeptide epoxyketone and an analog of epoxomicin. It was developed by Onyx Pharmaceuticals.
Callpod is a Chicago-based technology company. Its products include encryption software, battery chargers, device adaptors, Bluetooth-enabled devices for the consumer, business, and government markets.
Silver Spring Networks, a subsidiary of Itron, is a provider of smart grid products, headquartered in San Jose, California, with offices in Australia, Singapore, Brazil, and the United Kingdom. Besides communications devices, Silver Spring Networks develops software for utilities and customers to improve energy efficiency. Founded in 2002 backed by venture capital, Silver Spring Networks went public on the New York Stock Exchange on March 13, 2013. Itron acquired Silver Spring Networks in January 2018 for $830 million.
Onyx Pharmaceuticals Inc. has been a biopharmaceutical company headquartered in South San Francisco, California. The company developed and marketed medicines for the treatment of cancer. Onyx was founded in 1992 by Kevin J. Kinsella and Frank McCormick Ph.D., FRS. McCormick served as the chief scientific officer until 1998, while Kinsella was the firm's chairman. In 2009, the company acquired Proteolix, Inc., a private biotechnology company, for $276 million in cash plus additional milestone payments. In January 2012, the company was named "the top biotechnology takeover target in 2012" through an industry survey. Onyx president and chief executive officer (CEO) Tony Coles had said that Onyx liked its prospects as an independent company and was focused on bringing new therapies to patients. However, at the end of August 2013, Amgen announced it was acquiring Onyx in an agreed $10.4 billion deal.
Craig M. Crews is an American scientist at Yale University. He is the John C. Malone Professor of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology, and also holds joint appointments in the departments of Chemistry and Pharmacology. Crews is the Executive Director of the Yale Center for Molecular Discovery and a former Editor of the journal Cell Chemical Biology. His research interests focus on chemical biology, particularly on controlled proteostasis. Crews is a pioneer in the field of targeted protein degradation and his lab's research led to the development of the anti-cancer drug carfilzomib (Kyprolis). He is the founder of Arvinas, the first biotechnology company to bring PROTAC drugs into clinical trials. In 2019, he was named an American Cancer Society Research Professor at the Yale University.
MINDBODY, Inc. is a San Luis Obispo, California-based software-as-a-service company that provides cloud-based online scheduling and other business management software for the wellness services industry. Founded in 2001, the company services over 58,000 health and wellness businesses with about 35 million consumers in over 130 countries and territories. Since October 2021, the company has owned ClassPass. It is majority owned by Vista Equity Partners, a private equity firm.
Raymond Joseph Deshaies is an American biochemist and cell biologist. He is senior vice president of global research at Amgen and a visiting associate at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Prior to that, he was a professor of biology at Caltech and an investigator of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He is also the co-founder of the biotechnology companies Proteolix and Cleave Biosciences. His research focuses on mechanisms and regulation of protein homeostasis in eukaryotic cells, with a particular focus on how proteins are conjugated with ubiquitin and degraded by the proteasome.
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.
Nothing Technology Limited is a consumer technology company based in London, England. It was founded by Carl Pei, the co-founder of OnePlus. Investors in the company include iPod inventor Tony Fadell, Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin, Reddit CEO Steve Huffman, and YouTuber Casey Neistat. On 25 February 2021, the company announced Teenage Engineering as a founding partner, mainly responsible for the brand's design aesthetic and its products. Nothing's first product "ear (1)" was launched on 27 July 2021.
Manscaped is a male grooming company based in San Diego, California, US. It was founded in 2016 by Paul Tran and produces and distributes male grooming tools and hygiene products under the Manscaped brand.
