We're an early stage venture capital firm focused on equity investments in companies with dramatic growth potential, primarily in technology and highly-scalable services businesses. Our focus investment areas are digital health, fintech, consumer software, and enterprise software.

OCA Ventures

IQT identifies and partners with companies developing advanced technologies. It evaluates emerging technologies and collaborates with entities that show potential for practical applications. IQT serves industries such as defense, cybersecurity, and telecommunications.

TechNexus Venture Collaborative (TechNexus) helps leading corporations and ambitious entrepreneurs work together to create new business models, revenue streams, products, and scalable market access. A first-of-its-kind Venture Collaborative, TechNexus combines capital investment, incubation, and collaboration to provide an untapped advantage. Since 2007, TechNexus has accelerated business opportunities between dozens of leading corporations and more than 600 startups, and is among the most active venture investors in the US.

TechNexus Venture Collaborative

Bossa Invest manages investment portfolios and provides asset management services to clients. It analyzes market trends to inform investment decisions. Bossa Invest serves multiple sectors, including finance, technology, and real estate.

Bossa Invest

Alumni Ventures Group provides high-quality, diversified venture portfolios to individual investors who previously haven't had access to VC. It helps accredited alums from top entrepreneurial schools invest together in the ventures of fellow alums. The firm backs companies with an alumni connection and an institutional lead investor with expertise in the space. AVG also offers focused funds that allow any accredited investor access to a venture portfolio, diversified by type, sector, stage, and geography. Beth Obermiller, Michael Madden, and Mike Collins co-founded the firm in Manchester, New Hampshire in 2013.

Alumni Ventures

Sleeping Bear Capital is a founder-first private equity firm that invests in orphan and aging venture-backed technology and e-commerce companies seeking new capital to reach their fullest potential.   Long-time private equity investor and entrepreneur, Ranvir Gujral, founded the firm when he recognized a void for funding options for companies in this life stage.

Sleeping Bear Capital

Greycroft is a venture capital firm that focuses on technology start-ups and investments in the Internet and mobile markets. With offices in two of the most important business hubs in the world, New York and Los Angeles Greycroft uniquely positioned to serve entrepreneurs who have chosen us as their partners. The firm leverages an extensive network of media and technology industry connections to help entrepreneurs gain visibility, build strategic relationships, bring their products to market, and build successful businesses.  Greycroft manages in excess of $1 billion and has made over 200 investments since its inception in leading companies including Acorns, App Annie, Bird, Botkeeper, Bright Health, Boxed, Braintree, Buddy Media, Everything But The House, Extreme Reach, Huffington Post, Icertis, JW Player, Maker Studios, Plated, Scopely, Shipt, TheRealReal, Thrive Market, Trunk Club, Venmo, WideOrbit, and Yeahka. Greycroft has adopted the Diversity Term Sheet Rider.

Greycroft

Valor Equity Partners is an operational growth investment firm that focuses on growth companies across various stages of development. For decades, it has served its companies with the expertise to solve the challenges of growth and scale. Valor Equity partners with companies and entrepreneurs who are committed to the highest standards of excellence and the courage to transform their industries.

Valor Equity Partners

Pritzker Group Venture Capital helps entrepreneurs build market-leading technology companies at every stage of their growth. Since its founding in 1996, the firm has worked side-by-side with entrepreneurs at more than 100 companies, building partnerships based on trust and integrity. Its proprietary capital structure allows for tremendous flexibility, and our experienced team of investment professionals and entrepreneurs offers companies a vast network of strategic relationships and guidance.  Successful exits in recent years include Fleetmatics (NYSE: FLTX), SinglePlatform (acquired by Constant Contact), Zinch (acquired by Chegg), Playdom (acquired by Disney), LeftHand Networks (acquired by Hewlett-Packard), and TicketsNow (acquired by Ticketmaster).

Pritzker Group Venture Capital

Illinois Ventures is a seed and early-stage technology investment firm focused on research-derived companies in information technologies, physical sciences and life sciences, with a particular emphasis on those deriving from research conducted at the University of Illinois and other regional research institutions and federal laboratories.  Current investments reflect targeted practice areas in energy, device physics, advanced materials, biotechnology, medical devices and instrumentation, homeland security, and software.  Illinois Ventures works with inventors & entrepreneurs to mold concepts, vision, intellectual property, sweat and passion into breakthrough, high-growth companies, and was recently named by Entrepreneur magazine to its list of the top 100 venture capital firms nationally for entrepreneurs.

Illinois Ventures

HPA operates in the financial services sector, focusing on early-stage investments. The company's People First model combines venture capital, a robust business network, and top-tier operating expertise to support the growth of its portfolio companies. HPA's services extend to all stages of a company's lifecycle, from seed to growth stages, providing financial and strategic support to help businesses thrive. It was founded in 2007 and headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

HPA (Hyde Park Angels)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a research university that conducts research and offers educational courses in science, technology, and engineering. Its five schools and one college encompass numerous academic departments, divisions, and degree-granting programs as well as interdisciplinary centers, laboratories, and programs. Degrees earned at MIT include bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate. Students from MIT are regularly named Fulbright Fellows, Marshall Scholars, Rhodes Scholars, Truman Scholars, and Gates Scholars. The faculty of MIT has won numerous awards, including the Nobel Prize, Medal of Science, John Bates Clark Medal, Fields Medal, PECASE awards, MacArthur ’genius’ grants, and more. Many faculty members are of the AAAS, IEEE, American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and other prestigious societies.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

PSP Capital Partners, LLC is a private investment firm founded by Penny Pritzker, who currently serves as the United States Secretary of Commerce. PSP Capital takes a long-term, fundamental approach to investing with partners who share its core values of integrity, discretion and candor. With a perpetual and significant capital base, PSP partners with like-minded, dynamic business owners, management teams, and entrepreneurs in a variety of strong businesses and growing industries. PSP’s founder and principals have a strong legacy and long history of owning and building businesses and its organization is differentiated by a significant and permanent capital base, speed and certainty of closing transactions, flexibility with respect to investment structures and a deep network of strategic resources.

PSP Capital Partners

Northwestern University is a school that features many different areas of study. Though the school is known for its strong arts programs, many students also enroll in science, engineering, and medical fields. Programs include Biological Sciences, Computer Engineering, Drama, Earth and Planetary Sciences, Film and Media Studies, Integrated Marketing Communication, Journalism, Performance Studies, Sociology, Theatre, and many others. Northwestern University provides exam resources for certification needs through certkillers.net, helping students prepare for the job market. The university offers financial aid options, including loans, grants, work-study programs, and scholarships like the Northwestern University Scholarship. In addition to annual job fairs, students can access internship and job listings, programs to explore different majors and career paths. For those who cannot attend the Evanston campus, Northwestern also has locations in Chicago and a new satellite campus in Qatar for international students. Student life at Northwestern includes over 200 extracurricular groups, facilities like a museum, concert hall, cinema, and theater, alongside a strong athletic program.

Northwestern University

With an in-depth focus on research and exceptional due diligence plus a 30-year track record, VCapital Management Co. identifies early-stage, institutional-quality venture capital opportunities with potential to grow, succeed, and deliver returns to investors. Operational support and active guidance are provided to entrepreneurs for increasing chances for a successful outcome. Of particular interest are technology, medical, and science-related deals where growth potential is greatest. Employing a concierge and flexible service structure for investors, the VCapital team guides professional investment advisors and individuals who seek to add venture capital to diversify portfolios, manage risk, and meet wealth management goals.

VCapital

Gaingels is a venture investment syndicate in service of the LGBT+ community and its allies, investing in companies with LGBT+ founders and C-suite leaders at all stages of growth, as well as in more established companies resolved on building more inclusive teams, with a global portfolio of 130+ companies and $70M in deployed investment capital to date.  The Gaingels network also actively supports its portfolio in identifying and recruiting diverse talent to their C-suite and board leadership teams and fosters a vibrant global community of industry leaders, investors, operators, and entrepreneurs who share a common goal for positive social change through business and successful investments.

Gaingels

Castor Ventures is an investment firm. Castor Ventures invests in a broad range of venture-backed companies to build diversified venture portfolios invested alongside established venture firms.

Castor Ventures

Levy Family Partners is an investment enterprise that owns restaurants that operates concessions at various stadiums and arenas.

Levy Family Partners

Wolf Capital Ventures believes that proactively seeking out partnerships with international investors will increase portfolio returns. Wolf Capital has an investment process which uses data analysis to find the most undervalued startup opportunities in Silicon Valley. They then have the experience to leverage international relationships to increase the sales and exit opportunities available to those startups.

Wolf Capital Ventures

Buoyant Ventures operates as an early-stage venture fund investing in digital solutions to climate risk. The firm was founded in 2019 and is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois.

Buoyant Ventures

Riverwalk Holdings is an India-focused early-stage venture capital fund investing in Seed - Series A startups. Riverwalk's focus sectors are SaaS, Fintech, and consumer brands. Riverwalk partners with entrepreneurs to accelerate technology-led transformation and create long-term value.

Riverwalk Holdings

Ocient

Ocient is a developer of a data analytics platform designed to provide rapid analysis of massive datasets. The company's platform works on large datasets measured in tens of terabytes, petabytes, or exabytes with trillions or quadrillions of rows, as well as ingressing billions of rows per second, filtering, and computing aggregate results at rates of up to trillions of rows per second, allowing organizations to harness the power of large datasets at scale and velocity.

Ocient is a provider of hyperscale data analytics solutions, enabling organizations to analyze large datasets with high performance and low cost.

Data Infrastructure & Analytics

Ocient raises $49.4M in funding to fuel development, growth

Ocient is a provider of hyperscale data analytics solutions, enabling organizations to analyze large datasets with high performance and low cost.Its flagship product, the Ocient Hyperscale Data Warehouse, transforms and loads data in seconds, executes complex queries on large datasets, and integrates AI, machine learning, and geospatial analytics into a unified solution. It supports structured and semi-structured data, offers advanced geospatial data analysis, and provides optimized loading, querying, and response times. These capabilities help businesses to drive innovation and achieve higher efficiency levels in data analysis.It also leverages compute-adjacent storage architecture (CASA) to improve data warehouse design to deliver real-time analysis for always-on workloads at scale. By bringing storage adjacent to compute, CASA maximizes performance on industry-standard hardware, allowing users to transform, stream, and load data directly while executing previously infeasible queries.Key customers and partnershipsOcient has partnered with Carahsoft to bring its hyperscale data warehouse, analytics, and machine learning capabilities to US federal, state/local governments, and higher education organizations.

Fivetran is a cloud-based automated data integration platform that enables businesses to move data from various sources, including SaaS applications, databases, and files, into data warehouses, data lakes, and other destinations. The company's platform offers multiple deployment models to meet diverse business needs, ranging from stringent security requirements to maintaining on-premises databases even after partial cloud migration.The company's data movement platform is designed to automate and streamline the process of extracting, loading, and transforming (ELT) data, empowering organizations to focus on data-driven insights and decision-making. With real-time analytics, database replication, AI workflows, and cloud migrations facilitated by Fivetran, thousands of customers worldwide can leverage the platform to drive business growth.Fivetran's core offering revolves around its connector library, which supports over 500 data sources, including SaaS applications, databases, ERPs, and files. These connectors enable automatic, reliable, and secure data movement, regardless of whether the data resides on-premises, in the cloud, or in a hybrid environment. The platform's scalable architecture allows businesses to seamlessly add or remove data sources as their needs evolve.To enhance the usability and accessibility of the ingested data, Fivetran employs a normalized schema approach. By delivering data in a normalized format, the platform enables customers to remix and reshape the data according to their specific requirements, facilitating efficient data analysis and reporting. Additionally, Fivetran offers pre-built data models and dbt Core integration, empowering customers to create analytics-ready tables tailored to their business use cases, such as analyzing deal opportunities from Salesforce, generating general ledger reports from QuickBooks data, or evaluating return on ad spend across advertising platforms.In <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/30203">June 2024</a>, the company launched Managed Data Lake Service to simplify the process of managing data lakes for businesses of any size. Key benefits include the ability to centralize data for insights and convenience. Furthermore, it reduces costs by discontinuing support for legacy data warehouses.In September 2024,&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/33748">Fivetran introduced "Hybrid Deployment",</a> allowing customers to run data pipelines within their environment while managing them through Fivetran's platform. This solution enables enterprises to securely centralize data from various sources, including cloud-based SaaS apps and legacy databases. Fivetran claims Hybrid Deployment offers full visibility of all pipelines from a single interface, enhanced data security, and simplified setup and maintenance.Key customers and partnershipsOver the years, Fivetran has attracted a diverse range of customers across various industries, including ecommerce, finance, technology, and media. Notable clients include Autodesk, Conagra Brands, JetBlue, Lionsgate, Morgan Stanley, and Ziff Davis, among others. These companies leverage Fivetran's platform to streamline their data integration workflows, optimize their analytics capabilities, and gain a competitive edge through data-driven decision-making.To further enhance its offerings and enable seamless integrations, Fivetran has established strategic partnerships with various technology providers, including data warehousing solutions, cloud platforms, and business intelligence tools. For instance, Fivetran collaborates with Databricks, enabling customers to build an open lakehouse with Delta Lake powered by the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform. Additionally, Fivetran's integration with Unity Catalog provides out-of-the-box governance and security for Fivetran-generated tables.

Fivetran

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 Domo is a cloud-based analytics platform that enables businesses to connect, transform, and visualize data from various sources. It provides a comprehensive solution for data management, analysis, and visualization, empowering organizations to make data-driven decisions. Domo's platform is designed to foster collaboration, efficient decision-making, and improved business outcomes through its user-friendly interface and powerful data manipulation capabilities.
 
 
 Domo's key offerings include data integration, data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and intelligent applications. The platform leverages its Adrenaline engine and offers over 1,000 pre-built connectors to extract data from cloud applications, databases, spreadsheets, and other sources. This data is then stored in Domo's internal data warehouse or accessed through federated queries, enabling users to analyze and visualize it using Domo's extensive collection of visualization tools and dashboards.
 
 
 Domo&rsquo;s user experience is designed to be intuitive and accessible, fostering high adoption rates across organizations. Its user-friendly interface, seamless collaboration features, and mobile-first approach contribute to its widespread adoption and ease of use. Domo's platform is built for speed and scalability, allowing organizations to quickly access and analyze even large datasets without experiencing performance issues.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 Domo serves over 2,300 customers across various industries, including major enterprises such as eBay, Walmart, Cisco, Citibank, HP, The National Geographic Society, Verizon, US Army, Vanguard, Microsoft, IBM, Thomson Reuters, Airbus, Orange, AT&amp;T, Caterpillar, Volvo Cars, and Comcast.
 
 
 The platform has been widely adopted by organizations seeking to leverage data for better decision-making, improved customer insights, and enhanced marketing analytics. Domo has formed strategic partnerships with companies like Regional One Health and Torchy's Tacos, enabling them to leverage Domo's capabilities for healthcare metrics and finance applications, respectively.
 
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Domo

Founded in 2014, Confluent, Inc. is a technology company headquartered in Mountain View, California. The company specializes in data streaming platforms, primarily based on Apache Kafka, an open-source project created by Confluent's founders while working at LinkedIn. Confluent offers two main products: Confluent Platform, an on-premise solution, and Confluent Cloud, a fully managed SaaS. These products help organizations harness real-time data streams for various applications, including microservices, Internet of Things (IoT), financial services, fraud detection, and customer analytics.Confluent's primary offering in data infrastructure services is its integration solution, which enables organizations to unify data from disparate sources. The Confluent Platform and Confluent Cloud act as clients' central nervous systems, allowing them to connect various IT systems and applications to capture and process real-time data streams. This capability enables businesses to make decisions based on continuously flowing data.In September 2024,&nbsp;<a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/33818">Confluent announced upgrades to its Confluent Cloud</a> product, enhancing support for Apache Flink. The updates include support for the Table API, simplifying development for Java and Python users, and private networking support to improve data security. These upgrades aimed to simplify Flink deployments, enhance security, and make it easier for organizations in regulated industries to stream data and integrate it into applications.Key customers and partnershipIn December 2023, Confluent expanded partnerships with MongoDB, Pinecone, Rockset, Weaviate, and Zilliz as part of its "Data Streaming for AI" initiative. These partnerships aimed to provide real-time contextual data from Confluent's platform to partners' vector databases, facilitating the development of AI-powered applications.

Confluent

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 dbt Labs provides an open source data transformation tool that uses analytics engineering. It is aimed at programmers with knowledge of SQL to develop models with SELECT statements, test and document each model, and install safely with Git-enabled version control. The software enables the user to develop faster, work from the same assumptions, deploy with confidence, and&nbsp; ensure low risk with governance and safety. The company also offers dbt Core, which is an open source software for analytics engineers, and dbt Cloud Enterprise for secure, reliable access to data. JetBlue and Domain are some of its clients.
 
 
 
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dbt Labs

Starburst provides an analytics engine that enables organizations to access and analyze distributed data without moving it from its source location. The company's platform is built on Trino (formerly known as Presto), a distributed SQL query engine designed for running interactive analytics queries across various data sources. The platform allows users to query data across multiple databases, data lakes, and data warehouses simultaneously, eliminating the need for costly and time-consuming data centralization. In February 2023, Starburst introduced Warp Speed, a smart indexing and caching solution that accelerates queries up to 7x faster by autonomously identifying and caching frequently used data. The company's software includes two main offerings: Starburst Enterprise for self-managed deployments and Starburst Galaxy, a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution launched in 2021 that enables data lake and cross-cloud analytics. In February 2022, Starburst reported tripling its customer base and annual recurring revenue in the previous 12 months.
Key customers and partnerships
Starburst's platform is used by organizations including Zillow, Standard Chartered, Carrefour Brazil, Comcast, DoorDash, VMware, and Condé Nast. The platform helped Priceline reduce data storage costs by 5-10x while AssuranceIQ achieved a 10% increase in conversion rates. Starburst had established partnerships with major cloud platforms including AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Alibaba Cloud, Red Hat, and HPE. The company also partnered with Red Hat as one of the inaugural members of the Red Hat OpenShift Data Science ecosystem.

Starburst

Solutions to unify data from disparate sources by extracting, transforming, loading, and storing data in a usable form (such as in data warehouses) for further analysis.

Tools to monitor data for quality issues in real-time, as it moves throughout the data pipeline.

Providers of storage solutions that help accelerate data analytics. These include primary storage solutions, such as data warehouses and data lakes, and secondary storage solutions for non-mission-critical data.

Solutions that enable businesses to carry out data processing and create ML models on the underlying data for predictive analysis.

Tools for enterprises to visualize data in a graphical form and obtain insights on the same using AI and natural language processing.

Companies that use GenAI as a core part of their product offering for data infrastructure & analytics.

Leverages GenAI to help organizations extract insights and supports GenAI application development through data preparation

Offers data analytics and storage platforms for business under a B2B SaaS model

These are tools that help prepare data for AI/ML applications

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 Data analytics solution provider Ocient has raised USD 49.4 million in an expanded Series B financing round. The funding round was led by Greycroft and OCA Ventures, and included participation from Buoyant Ventures, Levy Family Partners, Riverwalk Capital, and Wolf Capital Management. With this investment, Ocient's total funding till date has reached USD 119 million.
 These new funds will be utilized to bolster Ocient’s product capabilities and deliver hyperscale data analytics solutions to an expanding global customer base.
 Established in 2016, Ocient offers software solutions designed to manage and analyse large and complex data sets. Innovative features of Ocient's offerings, such as its Compute Adjacent Storage Architecture (CASA), offer enhanced performance and save costs and energy in data analysis.
 
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Ocient

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