WRVI ADVANTAGE

We are a seasoned team, combining extensive careers as entrepreneurs, CXOs, senior management, and board roles at industry leading enterprises.

Operational Expertise

We've built multi-billion-dollar businesses, holding C-suite positions at companies like Cadence, Flextronics, Alcatel, Aptina, and Intel. 

Industry Leadership

Our portfolio companies benefit from our network of industry pioneers, LPs, and our active collaborations with CVCs, VCs, PE, and academic centers.

Network Access

Collaborative mentorship and guidance from our team provides unmatched operational knowledge to unlock maximum growth over the long-term.

Growth Mentorship

WRVI Capital is a leading Silicon Valley-based technology venture firm that focuses on investing in and scaling companies with disruptive technologies. Our intellectual capital, which comprises extensive business operations experience, technical expertise, and robust technology relationships, allows us to drive continuous and measurable progress for our portfolio companies.

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about us

We guide today's companies that are creating tomorrow's solutions.

Katana Graph raises $28.5 million to handle unstructured data at scale

Atonarp is a scientific instrumentation company developing imaging platforms for molecular analysis, revolutionizing how data is sensed, collected, processed and interpreted at the molecular level. Its products have far-reaching applications in pharma, healthcare, oil and gas, and semi-manufacturing.

Why we backed Atonarp?

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Atonarp is at the forefront of non-invasive healthcare diagnostics and molecular imaging.

Life Sciences Instrumentation

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Atonarp

Berkeley Lights is a digital cell biology company working to accelerate the discovery, development, and delivery of cell-based products. Developed platforms automate the manipulation, analysis and selection of individual cells to empower engineering of personalized therapies and antibody discovery.

Why we backed Berkeley Lights?

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Berkeley Lights completed its IPO in 2020 and has established market leadership in digital cell biology.

Digital Cell Biology

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Berkeley Lights

Habana Labs is an AI Processor company building ground-up platforms optimized for training deep neural networks and for inference deployment in production environments. Habana is unlocking the true potential of AI with orders of magnitude gains in processing performance, scalability, cost and efficiency.

Why we backed Habana Labs?

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100% AI. Processors purpose-built to unlock performance.

Habana Labs Ltd.

Unlocking the true potential of AI with solutions offering orders of magnitude improvements in processing performance, scalability, power consumption and cost.

Habana labs

Habana Labs was acquired by Intel for ≈$2B to advance Intel's AI strategy with a high-performance training processor family and a standards-based programming environment to address evolving AI workload

AI and deep learning processor for cloud

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Habana Labs

Innovium is a semiconductor company driving efficient resource sharing and freeing data flow in hyperscale networks. The team is proven in delivering market-leading products bringing billions in revenues. Innovium's Telanyx Ethernet Switch Silicon brings industry leading analytics, efficiency and programmability. 

Why we backed Innovium?

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Innovium is a leading provider of high performance, innovative switching silicon solutions and its products have been selected and validated by market-leaders.

High performance switch silicon

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Innovium

Movandi develops network technology designed to expand wireless communication and connectivity across the globe. It makes components for use with the millimeter wave system of extremely high frequency radio signals that is used in high-speed wireless broadband like 5G.

Why we backed Movandi?

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Movandi's mmwave technologies are poised to be the backbone of leading 5G networks globally. 

5G Wireless Technologies

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Movandi

VeriSilicon is a Silicon Platform as a Service (SiPaaS) company providing world class System on a Chip (SoC) and System in a Package (SiP) solutions, and is a leading IP provider for markets including mobile, datacenters, IoT, automotive, industrial, and medical electronics.


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VeriSilicon went public in 2020. It is ranked 1st in mainland China and 7th worldwide for IP license revenue.

Silicon Platform as a Service

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VeriSilicon

Our decades of technology, operating, and investing experience nurture some of today’s most promising companies around the globe.

Companies

Countries

Co-investors

Exits

News from our portfolio and our insights about the technologies, trends, and investments shaping tomorrow’s solutions.

WRVI Capital has invested in deep tech since the beginning. 

Berkeley Lights, a deep tech innovator in digital cell biology, became a market leader this past year.

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The world is obviously different than it was a year ago. The way we work and learn, the way we diagnose patients and pursue drug discovery, has been forever changed. At the heart of enabling these changes lies deep tech. 

Deep tech companies use new scientific discovery or engineering innovation to create foundational technology disruptions that make what had been impossible, possible. The quickly evolving environment in 2020 rapidly accelerated innovations reliant on these deep tech foundations, causing broadband, hybrid cloud infrastructure, and digital biology to soar in value as the world reacted to a new way of life.

But the number of VC firms that understand the space has significantly shrunk due to shifts investors made decades ago. In the 1990s, venture capital was dominated by hardware, including semiconductors, PCs, servers, mobile phones, etc. The venture firms making these investments had significant domain expertise because the firms themselves were run by people coming from leading hardware companies. 

As the first wave of venture capitalists retired, they were replaced by investors who pursued enterprise software, e-commerce, and SaaS companies of all kinds. Their investments were driven by two assumptions. The first is that hardware is capital intensive, and the second is that software with its much higher gross margins was not. 

These assumptions were not as dramatic as expected. Hardware, while initially more capital intensive, became an outsourcing game. Products made by contract manufacturers like Flextronics and Foxconn reduced the capital intensity substantially. The same happened with semiconductors as they were outsourced to places like TSMC and other companies. At the same time, rather than being capital light, software turned out to require incredible amounts of money for sales and marketing.

The result? Average VC returns have slid continuously over the years. Venture capital used to outperform Nasdaq by a lot, then a little, and in the last five years its comparative performance has been negative. 

At the same time, the buying universe for deep tech companies has exploded with demand coming from companies like Samsung, Intel, Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Broadcom, to name a few. In addition, traditional software and ecommerce companies (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Netflix, and others) have all jumped into hardware and cloud in a big way.

While many VC firms moved away from deep tech investment over the years, WRVI Capital has been rooted in deep tech since the beginning precisely because it’s the backbone of all technology innovation. 

Our extensive [portfolio](https://wrvi.vc/portfolio) includes many hardware and hardware-related businesses across industries such as AI/machine learning, next generation data and infrastructure, intelligence of things, and data biology/molecular diagnostics. Take the breathtaking performance of our portfolio companies [Berkeley Lights](https://www.berkeleylights.com/) and [SambaNova](https://sambanova.ai/SambaNova) as examples. They have turned groundbreaking deep tech innovations into market leadership in digital cell biology and semiconductors. 

Demand driven by Covid-19 and other dynamics has fueled significant M&A activity for WRVI’s portfolio. It also resulted in the firm's strong performance despite this year’s challenging landscape. As one of the few VC firms successfully investing in deep tech from the beginning, our portfolio companies benefit from our intellectual capital, comprised of extensive business operations experience, technical expertise, and robust technology company relationships.

So, while much of the business world spent 2020 reacting to a barrage of new challenges by tweaking and repackaging existing solutions, WRVI Capital’s focus on deep tech allowed us to look past the noise and instead, spend time imagining the technology solutions the world will need tomorrow.

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Deep Tech Shines Amid Pandemic

This impressive group adds to the firm’s already deep bench of technical and operational expertise. 

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WRVI Capital is pleased to welcome two new partners and a senior advisor to the firm. This impressive group adds to the firm’s already deep bench of technical and operational expertise. 

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### [Terry Gilton, Partner](https://wrvi.vc/people/terry-gilton)
Terry’s 30-year career in the semiconductor industry spans research and development in materials, memory and processing devices, sensors, algorithms, as well as extensive experience bringing these technologies to international mass production. Terry received his Ph.D. in Chemical Physics from UC Santa Barbara and then began his career in research and development at Micron Technology. He was VP of R&D at Micron Imaging for the rise of CMOS imager technology, delivering the sensor to the Motorola Razr and first iPhone. Terry was a key part of the executive team that managed the spin-out of Micron Imaging to become Aptina Imaging. He was recruited by Apple to create a sensor technology development team and was hired as its Senior Director of Sensor Technology, reporting to the SVP of Engineering. At Apple, Terry’s team was involved in all product lines and all sensing modalities; Terry was directly responsible for many technologies used in current Apple products. Terry has 175 patents and about 160 applications, and has published and presented widely over his career.
### [Sarah Lucas, Partner](https://wrvi.vc/people/sarah-lucas)
Sarah will be advancing the firm’s efforts to support female and minority entrepreneurs. In addition to her work at WRVI, she is also a General Partner at Lucas Venture Group (LVG), a VC whose portfolio spans cybersecurity, e-commerce, networking, software analytics and transformative medical device companies. Prior to LVG, Sarah co-founded Beyond Type 1, a nonprofit organization uniting the diabetes community through platforms, programs, resources, and grants. By leveraging the power of social media, design and technology, Beyond Type 1 grew to a powerhouse global organization under Sarah’s leadership as CEO from 2015-2018. For over a decade, Sarah was one of the Bay Area's most sought after event designers, co-founding SarahSofia in 2005 and Sarah Lucas Designs in 2010. A passionate philanthropist, she has raised over $15 million for charities in the past 15 years and has served on the boards of several Bay Area and national organizations focused on youth, health, leadership and education. She has a BA in Communications from Santa Clara University.
### [Ajay Shah, Senior Advisor](https://wrvi.vc/people/ajay-shah)
Ajay Shah has served as Director and Chairman of the Board of SMART Global Holdings, Inc. since 2011 and became Executive Chairman on August 31, 2020. He was previously the Co-CEO starting in March 2018 and then President and Chief Executive Officer of SMART Global Holdings in June 2018 until August 2020. Ajay is also a Managing Partner at global investment firm Silver Lake, and is responsible for the firm’s middle market strategy, Silver Lake Sumeru. Since 2014, Mr. Shah has also served as a Senior Operating Partner of Sumeru Equity Partners, a middle-market private equity firm. Previously, he founded Shah Capital Partners, a private equity firm. Ajay co-founded SMART Modular in 1988 and served as Chairman of the board of directors and Chief Executive Officer through SMART Modular’s initial public offering in 1995 and until 1999, when it was acquired by Solectron. He currently serves on the boards of a number of private technology companies including Healthgrades and Vast Data, and previously served on the boards of Magellan Navigation, Inc., AVI-SPL, Inc., CMAC MicroTechnology, and Flex, to name a few. He is currently a senior fellow of the American Leadership Forum, serves on the boards of National Audubon Society and The Indian School of Business, India and is a Trustee of the American India Foundation. Mr. Shah has a B.S. in Engineering from the University of Baroda, India and an M.S. degree in Engineering Management from Stanford University.


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WRVI Capital Adds Three New Team Members

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Qualcomm to Acquire NUVIA

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B2B retail tech startup Arzooo raises $7.5M in Series A led by US-based WRVI Capital

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Movandi co-founder and co-CEO joins CNBC’s Disruptor 50 Summit

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WRVI leads investment in supersonic jet startup Boom Technology

WRVI NEWS & INSIGHTS

We believe that all great ideas can come from really anywhere and from anyone really. Here is your good chance to share your idea with us.

PITCH GUIDELINES TO FOLLOW

Our portfolio companies are designing the future of technology.

WRVI Capital

about wrvi

Operational Expertise

Industry Leadership

Network Access

Growth Mentorship

SEMICONDUCTORS, SYSTEMS, SOFTWARE AND HEALTHCARE

5G Wireless Technologies

Digital Cell Biology

AI and deep learning processor for cloud

Life Sciences Instrumentation

High performance switch silicon

Silicon Platform as a Service

The numbers speak for themselves

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Our Perspectives

Transforming potential into brilliance.