Month: October 2018

Egnyte launched in 2007 just two years after Box, but unlike its enterprise counterpart, which went all-cloud and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, Egnyte saw a different path with a slow and steady growth strategy and a hybrid niche, recognizing that companies were going to keep some content in the cloud and some on prem. Up until today it had raised a rather modest $62.5 million, and hadn’t taken a dime since 2013, but that all changed when the company announced a whopping $75 million investment.

The entire round came from a single investor, Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing arm, a part of Goldman’s Special Situations group. Holger Staude, vice president of Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing will join Egnyte’s board under the terms of the deal. He says Goldman liked what it saw, a steady company poised for bigger growth with the right influx of capital. In fact, the company has had more than eight straight quarters of growth and have been cash flow positive since Q4 in 2016.

“We were impressed by the strong management team and the company’s fiscal discipline, having grown their top line rapidly without requiring significant outside capital for the past several years. They have created a strong business model that we believe can be replicated with success at a much larger scale,” Staude explained.

Company CEO Vineet Jain helped start the company as a way to store and share files in a business context, but over the years, he has built that into a platform that includes security and governance components. Jain also saw a market poised for growth with companies moving increasing amounts of data to the cloud. He felt the time was right to take on more significant outside investment. He said his first step was to build a list of investors, but Goldman shined through, he said.

“Goldman had reached out to us before we even started the fundraising process. There was inbound interest. They were more aggressive compared to others. Given there was prior conversations, the path to closing was shorter,” he said.

He wouldn’t discuss a specific valuation, but did say they have grown 6x since the 2013 round and he got what he described as “a decent valuation.” As for an IPO, he predicted this would be the final round before the company eventually goes public. “This is our last fund raise. At this level of funding, we have more than enough funding to support a growth trajectory to IPO,” he said.

Philosophically, Jain has always believed that it wasn’t necessary to hit the gas until he felt the market was really there. “I started off from a point of view to say, keep building a phenomenal product. Keep focusing on a post sales experience, which is phenomenal to the end user. Everything else will happen. So this is where we are,” he said.

Jain indicated the round isn’t about taking on money for money’s sake. He believes that this is going to fuel a huge growth stage for the company. He doesn’t plan to focus these new resources strictly on the sales and marketing department, as you might expect. He wants to scale every department in the company including engineering, posts-sales and customer success.

Today the company has 450 employees and more than 14,000 customers across a range of sizes and sectors including Nasdaq, Thoma Bravo, AppDynamics and Red Bull. The deal closed at the end of last month.

Egnyte launched in 2007 just two years after Box, but unlike its enterprise counterpart, which went all-cloud and raised hundreds of millions of dollars, Egnyte saw a different path with a slow and steady growth strategy and a hybrid niche, recognizing that companies were going to keep some content in the cloud and some on prem. Up until today it had raised a rather modest $62.5 million, and hadn’t taken a dime since 2013, but that all changed when the company announced a whopping $75 million investment.

The entire round came from a single investor, Goldman Sachs’ Private Capital Investing arm, a part of Goldman’s Special Situations group. Holger Staude, vice president of Goldman Sachs Private Capital Investing will join Egnyte’s board under the terms of the deal. He says Goldman liked what it saw, a steady company poised for bigger growth with the right influx of capital. In fact, the company has had more than eight straight quarters of growth and have been cash flow positive since Q4 in 2016.

“We were impressed by the strong management team and the company’s fiscal discipline, having grown their top line rapidly without requiring significant outside capital for the past several years. They have created a strong business model that we believe can be replicated with success at a much larger scale,” Staude explained.

Company CEO Vineet Jain helped start the company as a way to store and share files in a business context, but over the years, he has built that into a platform that includes security and governance components. Jain also saw a market poised for growth with companies moving increasing amounts of data to the cloud. He felt the time was right to take on more significant outside investment. He said his first step was to build a list of investors, but Goldman shined through, he said.

“Goldman had reached out to us before we even started the fundraising process. There was inbound interest. They were more aggressive compared to others. Given there was prior conversations, the path to closing was shorter,” he said.

He wouldn’t discuss a specific valuation, but did say they have grown 6x since the 2013 round and he got what he described as “a decent valuation.” As for an IPO, he predicted this would be the final round before the company eventually goes public. “This is our last fund raise. At this level of funding, we have more than enough funding to support a growth trajectory to IPO,” he said.

Philosophically, Jain has always believed that it wasn’t necessary to hit the gas until he felt the market was really there. “I started off from a point of view to say, keep building a phenomenal product. Keep focusing on a post sales experience, which is phenomenal to the end user. Everything else will happen. So this is where we are,” he said.

Jain indicated the round isn’t about taking on money for money’s sake. He believes that this is going to fuel a huge growth stage for the company. He doesn’t plan to focus these new resources strictly on the sales and marketing department, as you might expect. He wants to scale every department in the company including engineering, posts-sales and customer success.

Today the company has 450 employees and more than 14,000 customers across a range of sizes and sectors including Nasdaq, Thoma Bravo, AppDynamics and Red Bull. The deal closed at the end of last month.

If any aliens or technology ingenues were trying to understand what on earth a ‘smart home’ is yesterday, via Google’s latest own-brand hardware launch event, they’d have come away with a pretty confused and incoherent picture.

The company’s presenters attempted to sketch a vision of gadget-enabled domestic bliss but the effect was rather closer to described clutter-bordering-on-chaos, with existing connected devices being blamed (by Google) for causing homeowners’ device usability and control headaches — which thus necessitated another new type of ‘hub’ device which was now being unveiled, slated and priced to fix problems of the smart home’s own making.

Meet the ‘Made by Google’ Home Hub.

Buy into the smart home, the smart consumer might think, and you’re going to be stuck shelling out again and again — just to keep on top of managing an ever-expanding gaggle of high maintenance devices.

Which does sound quite a lot like throwing good money after bad. Unless you’re a true believer in the concept of gadget-enabled push-button convenience — and the perpetually dangled claim that smart home nirvana really is just around the corner. One additional device at a time. Er, and thanks to AI!

Yesterday, at Google’s event, there didn’t seem to be any danger of nirvana though.

Not unless paying $150 for a small screen lodged inside a speaker is your idea of heaven. (i.e. after you’ve shelled out for all the other connected devices that will form the spokes chained to this control screen.)

A small tablet that, let us be clear, is defined by its limitations: No standard web browser, no camera… No, it’s not supposed to be an entertainment device in its own right.

It’s literally just supposed to sit there and be a visual control panel — with the usual also-accessible-on-any-connected-device type of content like traffic, weather and recipes. So $150 for a remote control doesn’t sound quite so cheap now does it?

The hub doubling as a digital photo frame when not in active use — which Google made much of — isn’t some kind of ‘magic pixie’ sales dust either. Call it screensaver 2.0.

A fridge also does much the same with a few magnets and bits of paper. Just add your own imagination.

During the presentation, Google made a point of stressing that the ‘evolving’ smart home it was showing wasn’t just about iterating on the hardware front — claiming its Google’s AI software is hard at work in the background, hand-in-glove with all these devices, to really ‘drive the vision forward’.

But if the best example it can find to talk up is AI auto-picking which photos to display on a digital photo frame — at the same time as asking consumers to shell out $150 for a discrete control hub to manually manage all this IoT — that seems, well, underwhelming to say the least. If not downright contradictory.

Google also made a point of referencing concerns it said it’s heard from a large majority of users that they’re feeling overwhelmed by too much technology, saying: “We want to make sure you’re in control of your digital well-being.”

Yet it said this at an event where it literally unboxed yet another clutch of connected, demanding, function-duplicating devices — that are also still, let’s be clear, just as hungry for your data — including the aforementioned tablet-faced speaker (which Google somehow tried to claim would help people “disconnect” from all their smart home tech — so, basically, ‘buy this device so you can use devices less’… ); a ChromeOS tablet that transforms into a laptop via a snap-on keyboard; and 2x versions of its new high end smartphone, the Pixel 3.

There was even a wireless charging Pixel Stand that props the phone up in a hub-style control position. (Oh and Google didn’t even have time to mention it during the cluttered presentation but there’s this Disney co-branded Mickey Mouse-eared speaker for kids, presumably).

What’s the average consumer supposed to make of all this incestuously overlapping, wallet-badgering hardware?!

Smartphones at least have clarity of purpose — by being efficiently multi-purposed.

Increasingly powerful all-in-ones that let you do more with less and don’t even require you to buy a new one every year vs the smart home’s increasingly high maintenance and expensive (in money and attention terms) sprawl, duplication and clutter. And that’s without even considering the security risks and privacy nightmare.

The two technology concepts really couldn’t be further apart.

If you value both your time and your money the smartphone is the one — the only one — to buy into.

Whereas the smart home clearly needs A LOT of finessing — if it’s to ever live up to the hyped claims of ‘seamless convenience’.

Or, well, a total rebranding.

The ‘creatively chaotic & experimental gadget lovers’ home would be a more honest and realistic sell for now — and the foreseeable future.

Instead Google made a pitch for what it dubbed the “thoughtful home”. Even as it pushed a button to pull up a motorised pedestal on which stood clustered another bunch of charge-requiring electronics that no one really needs — in the hopes that consumers will nonetheless spend their time and money assimilating redundant devices into busy domestic routines. Or else find storage space in already overflowing drawers.

The various iterations of ‘smart’ in-home devices in the market illustrate exactly how experimental the entire  concept remains.

Just this week, Facebook waded in with a swivelling tablet stuck on a smart speaker topped with a camera which, frankly speaking, looks like something you’d find in a prison warden’s office.

Google, meanwhile, has housed speakers in all sorts of physical forms, quite a few of which resemble restroom scent dispensers — what could it be trying to distract people from noticing?

And Amazon now has so many Echo devices it’s almost impossible to keep up. It’s as if the ecommerce giant is just dropping stones down a well to see if it can make a splash.

During the smart home bits of Google’s own-brand hardware pitch, the company’s parade of presenters often sounded like they were going through robotic motions, failing to muster anything more than baseline enthusiasm.

And failing to dispel a strengthening sense that the smart home is almost pure marketing, and that sticking update-requiring, wired in and/or wireless devices with variously overlapping purposes all over the domestic place is the very last way to help technology-saturated consumers achieve anything close to ‘disconnected well-being’.

Incremental convenience might be possible, perhaps — depending on which and how few smart home devices you buy; for what specific purpose/s; and then likely only sporadically, until the next problematic update topples the careful interplay of kit and utility. But the idea that the smart home equals thoughtful domestic bliss for families seems farcical.

All this updatable hardware inevitably injects new responsibilities and complexities into home life, with the conjoined power to shift family dynamics and relationships — based on things like who has access to and control over devices (and any content generated); whose jobs it is to fix things and any problems caused when stuff inevitably goes wrong (e.g. a device breakdown OR an AI-generated snafu like the ‘wrong’ photo being auto-displayed in a communal area); and who will step up to own and resolve any disputes that arise as a result of all the Internet connected bits being increasingly intertwined in people’s lives, willingly or otherwise.

Hey Google, is there an AI to manage all that yet?

Founders Factory out of London is a startup accelerator and incubator which has taken the older US-inspired startup acceleration model and put a European slant on it by going in deep with corporates, who often flounder in the space. After some success out of the UK you would expect them to expand to big markets like the US or Asia, but instead, they have skipped the obvious route and are now branching out into the emerging markets of the African continent.

It’s now partnering with Standard Bank, the largest African bank by assets across 20 African countries to bring the model to Africa.

Founders Factory Africa says it will design, build and scale 100 disruptive tech startups across the continent over the next five years, initially with five early stage startups and co-create two new companies every year within the incubator. To execute the project, they are partnering with Roo Rogers, a former partner of design agency Fuse Projects and CEO of the UK and US governments backed emerging market accelerator SPRING.

Standard Bank will not be the last partner. As FF has done before in the UK, it will bring in other corporates, where each invests several million pounds to grow the project across African markets.

Founders Factory, co-founded by Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox in London in 2015, has so far secured over £100m in funding for its 70 startups and implemented 60 pilots with its corporate partners with 30% securing enterprise contracts and five closing direct investments, they say.

The accelerator will grow existing businesses through a bespoke six-month programme, whilst the incubator will build completely new businesses focused on addressing key issues on the continent. It will be based in Johannesburg and will hire over 40 full-time specialists locally, covering all aspects needed to scale its startups including product development, UX/UI, engineering, investment, business development and, growth marketing.

Henry Lane Fox, Co-Founder and CEO, Founders Factory, said: “The time for Africa is now. As the world’s best partner for founders, we are excited to help empower a new generation of African entrepreneurs to build market-defining technology products.”

Roo Rogers, Co-Founder & CEO Founders Factory Africa, said: “Having worked in Africa for over a decade, I believe success is underpinned by strong collaboration. By harnessing the resources of Africa’s greatest startup entrepreneurs and combining with the operational might of corporates, we will deliver scaled solutions to sub-Sahara’s 1 billion consumers and establish Africa as an attractive destination for global investment.

He told me by phone from Sout Africa that there were huge logistical and infrastructure issues which make Africa a tricky place to scale in, but that he is confident that the corporate-backed accelerator model will succeed where other attempts have failed. “You need existing incumbents here to partner with. But this is not going to be a top-down approach, we will build locally with local teams and local partners in every case.”

Started by Brent Hoberman and Henry Lane Fox, Founders Factory has received investment from Marks & Spencer, L’Oreal, easyJet, Guardian Media Group, Aviva, Holtzbrinck and CSC.

Accion Systems, the startup aiming to reinvent satellite propulsion with an innovative and tiny new thruster, has attracted significant investment from Boeing’s HorizonX Ventures. The $3 million round should give the company a bit of breathing room while it continues to prove and improve its technology.

“Investing in startups with next-generation concepts accelerates satellite innovation, unlocking new possibilities and economics in Earth orbit and deep space,” said HorizonX Ventures managing director Brian Schettler in a press release.

Accion, whose founder and CEO Natalya Bailey graced the stage of Disrupt just a few weeks ago, makes what’s called a “tiled ionic liquid electrospray” propulsion system, or TILE. This system is highly efficient and can be made the size of a postage stamp or much larger depending on the requirements of the satellite.

The company has tested its tech in terrestrial facilities and in space, but it hasn’t been used for any missions just yet — though that may change soon. A pair of student-engineered cubesats equipped with TILE thrusters are scheduled to take off on RocketLab’s first big commercial payload launch, “It’s Business Time.” It’s been delayed a few times but early November is the next launch window, so everyone cross your fingers.

Another launch scheduled for November is the IRVINE 02 cubesat, which will sport TILEs and go up aboard a Falcon 9 loaded with supplies for the International Space Station.

The Boeing investment (Gettylab also participated in the round) doesn’t include any guarantees like equipping Boeing-built satellites with the thrusters. But the company is certainly already dedicated to this type of tech and the arrangement is characterized as a partnership — so it’s definitely a possibility.

A Boeing representative told me that this is aimed to help Accion scale, and that the latter will have access to the former’s testing facilities and expertise. “We believe there will be many applications for Accion’s propulsion system, and will be monitoring and assessing the tech as it continues to mature,” they wrote in an email.

I asked Accion what the new funding will be directed towards, but a representative only indicated that it would be used for the usual things: research, operations, staff expenses, and so on. Not some big skunk works project, then. The company’s last big round was in 2016, when it raised $7.5 million.

Nvidia, together with partners like IBM, HPE, Oracle, Databricks and others, is launching a new open-source platform for data science and machine learning today. Rapids, as the company is calling it, is all about making it easier for large businesses to use the power of GPUs to quickly analyze massive amounts of data and then use that to build machine learning models.

“Businesses are increasingly data-driven,” Nvidia’s VP of Accelerated Computing Ian Buck told me. “They sense the market and the environment and the behavior and operations of their business through the data they’ve collected. We’ve just come through a decade of big data and the output of that data is using analytics and AI. But most it is still using traditional machine learning to recognize complex patterns, detect changes and make predictions that directly impact their bottom line.”

The idea behind Rapids then is to work with the existing popular open-source libraries and platforms that data scientists use today and accelerate them using GPUs. Rapids integrates with these libraries to provide accelerated analytics, machine learning and — in the future — visualization.

Rapids is based on Python, Buck noted; it has interfaces that are similar to Pandas and Scikit, two very popular machine learning and data analysis libraries, and it’s based on Apache Arrow for in-memory database processing. It can scale from a single GPU to multiple notes and IBM notes that the platform can achieve improvements of up to 50x for some specific use cases when compared to running the same algorithms on CPUs (though that’s not all that surprising, given what we’ve seen from other GPU-accelerated workloads in the past).

Buck noted that Rapids is the result of a multi-year effort to develop a rich enough set of libraries and algorithms, get them running well on GPUs and build the relationships with the open-source projects involved.

“It’s designed to accelerate data science end-to-end,” Buck explained. “From the data prep to machine learning and for those who want to take the next step, deep learning. Through Arrow, Spark users can easily move data into the Rapids platform for acceleration.”

Indeed, Spark is surely going to be one of the major use cases here, so it’s no wonder that Databricks, the company founded by the team behind Spark, is one of the early partners.

“We have multiple ongoing projects to integrate Spark better with native accelerators, including Apache Arrow support and GPU scheduling with Project Hydrogen,” said Spark founder Matei Zaharia in today’s announcement. “We believe that RAPIDS is an exciting new opportunity to scale our customers’ data science and AI workloads.”

Nvidia is also working with Anaconda, BlazingDB, PyData, Quansight and scikit-learn, as well as Wes McKinney, the head of Ursa Labs and the creator of Apache Arrow and Pandas.

Another partner is IBM, which plans to bring Rapids support to many of its services and platforms, including its PowerAI tools for running data science and AI workloads on GPU-accelerated Power9 servers, IBM Watson Studio and Watson Machine Learning and the IBM Cloud with its GPU-enabled machines. “At IBM, we’re very interested in anything that enables higher performance, better business outcomes for data science and machine learning — and we think Nvidia has something very unique here,” Rob Thomas, the GM of IBM Analytics told me.

“The main benefit to the community is that through an entirely free and open-source set of libraries that are directly compatible with the existing algorithms and subroutines that their used to — they now get access to GPU-accelerated versions of them,” Buck said. He also stressed that Rapids isn’t trying to compete with existing machine learning solutions. “Part of the reason why Rapids is open source is so that you can easily incorporate those machine learning subroutines into their software and get the benefits of it.”

Snapchat needs reasons for teens to come back every day as it struggles to grow amidst competition from Instagram, so it’s capitalizing on its Los Angeles roots. Today Snapchat unveiled its fall slate of a dozen “Original” video shows including its first scripted programs from top producers like Bunim/Murray and Makeready.

The Snapchat Originals will appear in Discover, which will soon have a dedicated section for Shows, as well as new permanent Show Profile pages available through Snapchat search. And with new Show Portal lenses, users can stick an augmented reality doorway in their Snaps that they can walk through to explore a scene from the Show and then tap to watch that Show, allowing them to spread virally.

“Time spent watching shows on Snapchat has tripled this year alone” a Snapchat executive tells me. The stats on Snap’s previous shows made it clear there was an opportunity to double down, especially as original mobile programming efforts like Facebook Watch and Instagram’s IGTV have stumbled. NBC News’ twice daily show Stay Tuned has doubled viewership in the past year to 5 million unique viewers per day, over half of which watch at least 3 days per week, while SporsCenter’s show reaches 17 million monthly viewers.

 

Co-working today is a global game that’s played by many more than just WeWork, despite the company’s valuation surging to $20 billion. But, as WeWork increasingly globalizes its focus, the U.S. firm is coming into contact with smaller players who are highly localized in markets with the potential to grow significantly.

One such market is Indonesia, the largest economy in the growing region of Southeast Asia. Indonesia’s capital alone has a population of 10 million and it is tipped to overtake Tokyo as the world’s most populous city by 2020. WeWork is prioritizing Indonesia as one of the keys markets in Asia but already there are strong local competitors. EV Hive, now known as Cocowork, raised $20 million earlier this year, and now Gowork, a startup formed from a merger between Rework and GoWork, has pulled in $10 million for expansion.

The new capital is led by VC firm Gobi Partners and The Paradise Group, a firm that operates shopping malls, residential developments and more. 

GoWork currently operates 16 ‘hubs’ which are its main locations for 8,000 members and operate at over 90 percent occupancy. In addition, that reach is extended by a series of over 30 ‘spokes.’ Those are essentially smaller spaces that are designed to be accessible while members are traveling or wanting to work outside of normal business hours. They are developed in conjunction with F&B group Ismaya, so are located within their coffee shops or restaurants.

That might concept might sound cute but trivial in the West, but in Asia’s megacities, the option can help with productivity. In particular, Jakarta’s roads are so traffic logged that a day of meetings could require spendings hours queuing in traffic.

“We want to bring productivity to all people, we think that [issues like traffic jams] are costing us all money,” GoWork CEO Vanessa Hendriadi told TechCrunch in an interview.

Adding The Paradise Group to the team could help expand that spoke reach, as well as finding new real estate for GoWork spaces.

“Co-working is not a category anymore, it’s just how people work,” Hendriadi added. “WeWork has 57 spaces in Manhattan alone, it’s just a matter of time for when every office building or mall in Jakarta will need to have a space as this is a permanent shift in how people work.”

She added that, as in the West, Indonesia is beginning to see a shift in working for larger companies not just small startups or independent workers.

That’s why, Hendriadi explained, that GoWork is doubling down on its focus on Jakarta and look to second-tier cities, but there’s no immediate plan to venture overseas. The goal is to grow to reach over 100,000 sqm by 2020.

The GoWork CEO said that her company isn’t phased by WeWork and others like Cocowork — the latter which she said is aimed more at the mass market. Instead, Hendriadi believes that there is plenty of space in the market for a few major players.

“Obviously we watch what [WeWork] are doing and we speak to building owners to know where they are going, the fact we have a two-year head start — we’re talking to major property developers with great location — means we are not too worried. The pie is big and local players get a huge benefit that is not easily replicable by non-local players in this business as it is relationship based,” she said.

“We’re all here to educate the market and fulfill their needs,” she added. “Indonesia is the market we are familiar with, the opportunity is still massive so we’ll focus here, but we talk to big players in the region so when the opportunity comes with the right partner we won’t close any doors.”

Google has lodged its legal appeal against the European Commission’s €4.34 billion (~$5BN) antitrust ruling against its Android mobile OS, according to Reuters — the first step in a process that could keep its lawyers busy for years to come.

“We have now filed our appeal of the EC’s Android decision at the General Court of the EU,” it told the news agency, via email.

We’ve reached out to Google for comment on the appeals process.

Rulings made by the EU’s General Court in Luxembourg can be appealed to the top court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, but only on points of law.

Europe’s competition commissioner, Margrethe Vestager, announced the record-breaking antitrust penalty for Android in July, following more than two years of investigation of the company’s practices around its smartphone operating system.

Vestager said Google had abused the regional dominance of its smartphone platform by requiring that manufacturers pre-install other Google apps as a condition for being able to license the Play Store.

She also found the company had made payments to some manufacturers and mobile network operators in exchange for them exclusively pre-installing Google Search on their devices, and used Google Play licensing to prevent manufacturers from selling devices based on Android forks — which would not have to include Google services and, in Vestager’s view, “could have provided a platform for rival search engines as well as other app developers to thrive”.

Google rejected the Commission’s findings and said it would appeal.

In a blog post at the time, Google CEO Sundar Pichai argued the contrary — claiming the Android ecosystem has “created more choice, not less” for consumers, and saying the Commission ruling “ignores the new breadth of choice and clear evidence about how people use their phones today”.

According to Reuters the company reiterated its earlier arguments in reference to the appeal.

A spokesperson for the EC told us simply: “The Commission will defend its decision in Court.”

You thought TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin was all about SaaS, fintech, social, blockchain and all the traditional tech topics? Of course not! I’m excited to announce that Mike Collett from Promus Ventures is going to tell you why you should care about space beyond SpaceX.

Arguably, SpaceX is the reason why many people are interested in space topics. But there’s a vibrant ecosystem of startups that are working on small and big challenges to create new use cases, launch bigger objects, travel further and open up new possibilities.

Collett in particular has been studying this (ahem) space for many years. He’s the founder and managing partner of Promus Ventures, a VC firm focused on deep tech investments.

He invests in many things, such as AI, robotics, computer vision, blockchain, healthcare, agriculture and… space. Before that, he focused on nanotechnology more specifically, with investments in quantum cascade lasers, quantum dots, photonic integrated optoelectronic devices, nano-engineered fabrics and more.

It’s clear that Collett will have plenty of interesting things to say about the current landscape of space startups. That’s why you should buy your ticket to Disrupt Berlin to listen to this discussion and many others. The conference will take place on November 29-30.

In addition to fireside chats and panels, like this one, new startups will participate in the Startup Battlefield Europe to win the highly coveted Battlefield cup.

Mike Collett

Founder & Managing Partner, Promus Ventures

Mike Collett is Founder and Managing Partner of Promus Ventures, a venture capital firm based in Chicago and San Francisco investing in deep-technology software and hardware companies in the U.S., Europe and New Zealand. Mike has been a venture capital investor in software and hardware for over 15 years. He has invested in more than 65 private technology companies, including areas such as artificial intelligence/machine learning, space, fintech, robotics, syn bio, computer vision, connected car, blockchain, healthcare, insurance, agriculture, nanotechnology and others. Mike currently serves on numerous Boards of Directors of private technology companies, including Spire, Gauss Surgical, Dispatch, ICEYE, CrossLend, Rhombus and others.

Mike previously was Founder and Managing Partner of Masters Capital Nanotechnology Fund, a venture capital firm. Investments included companies in quantum cascade lasers, quantum dots, photonic integrated optoelectronic devices, nano-engineered fabrics and others. While at Masters Capital, a hedge fund, Mike invested in private technology software and hardware companies. Prior to venture capital, Mike was a Vice President at Merrill Lynch in their Mergers & Acquisitions group as well as an Associate at Duff & Phelps.

Mike holds a Bachelor’s of Science in Math and Bachelor’s of Arts in English from Vanderbilt University. He also holds a Masters of Business Administration in Finance from Washington University in St. Louis. Mike and his wife Paige have four children and live in Chicago.