Berkeley Lights

Bossa Nova Robotics

Boom Technology

Canary Connect

White Rabbit

The Melt

Finicast

Enjoy

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AI / Machine Learning

Automotive

Construction (ConstructionTech)

Consumer Electronics

Data Center

Enterprise Software

Internet of Things

Real Estate (RealTech)

Retail (RetailTech)

Robotics

Security

Semiconductors

Life Sciences

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

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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H2O.ai is an open-source software company transforming and democratizing artificial intelligence with H2O, a broadly trusted open source data science and machine learning platform. They’ve also developed H2O Driverless AI, providing an easier, faster, and more effective tool for data scientists. 

COMPANY NEWS

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H2O.AI

Katerra is a technology-led construction company transforming every aspect of building design, materials supply, and construction. Off-site component manufacture and unified systems result in lower costs, faster field assembly, and higher-quality finishes. 

Impact on projects per year

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katerra

Founded in Jan 2015, Katerra transforms how the buildings and spaces come to life and the afterall.

Transforming construction through technology

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Katerra

Percipient is a CV (Computer Vision) focussed platform company that provides advanced analytics for national security and corporate security missions. The company's Mirage platform transforms raw data to actionable intelligence and uses deep learning algorithms for object detection, classification, activity recognition, and automated alerting. Mirage is being used for full motion video analysis, geo-spatial intelligence, and to analyze multi-source intelligence data.

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Percipient.ai

Telescent is a networking platform company extending software to the physical layer of data center, telecom, mobile, and lab networks. It provides a complete solution to automate the management of the physical network topology for rapid reconfiguration, reprovisioning, and retasking of networks.

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Telescent

Volta Industries is building the country's most used electric vehicle charging network, with citywide systems in 50+ municipalities. Installed in high-traffic locations in top media markets, and sponsored by consumer brands, Volta EV chargers are available to both drivers and real estate hosts free of cost. 

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Volta Industries

WhiteRabbit.ai is a healthcare company focused on early and accurate cancer detection. Its platform applies deep learning for tumor image analysis and is able to detect cancers that are often missed by radiologists. Whiterabbit.ai is partnering with diagnostic clinic networks to deploy its platform.

Why we backed Whiterabbit.ai?

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WhiteRabbit.ai

Bossa Nova Robotics is developing autonomous robots to provide and analyze real-time on-shelf inventory data for the global retail industry, allowing large-scale stores 24hour access to the data required to accuratley manage product availability, stock levels and reordering.

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Quartic.ai is an AI/ML company focusing on smart manufacturing and IoT. Quartic's solution enables plant subject-matter experts to leverage AI for process and energy optimization and predictive maintenance. Fortune 500 companies in pharmaceutical, mining and metals and other industries use this platform.

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Quartic.ai

DataRobot is an AI platform company democratizing data science with end-to-end automation and support for building, deploying, and managing machine learning models. Their solution includes an AI-native strategic success team imbedded within the platform.

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DataRobot

Smartfrog is an IoT company that offers a unified home security platform consisting of hardware, consumer apps, and a cloud platform. With a focus on AI services and software, the platform enables live streaming, IFTT, emergency actions, intelligent notifications and timelines, and home health monitoring.

Smartfrog

Maui Greens began by farming culinary herbs using hydroponic vertical towers with products shipped to retailers. They’ve since developed an aeroponic growing system allowing living vessels with organic leafy greens to be sold to customers at affordable prices with the least carbon footprint.

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Maui Greens

Boom is an aviation company developing a Mach 2+ supersonic commercial aircraft - the Overture. This aircraft will reduce flight times for long-haul flights by up to 2x, dramatically altering the cost-benefit of long-distance air travel. 

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Boom

Mach 2+ 55-passenger supersonic transport aircraft

Michael Marks

Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning

Cryptography

Edge Computing

Graphics

Mobility

Networking

Others

Software & Services

Imaging

Systems & Data Infrastructure

Founding Managing Partner

Schneider Electric

SoftBank

Eta Compute

Fungible

HiDeep

Innovium

Katana Graph

Komprise

LightBits

Nuvia

Prosimo

Proteantecs

SambaNova Systems

VDOO

Vayyar Imaging

CNEX Labs

Credo

Dustphotonics

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Data Infrastructure

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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NetSpeed Systems provides scalable Network-on-Chip (NoC) IPs to System-on-chip (SoC) designers for applications from mobile to high-performance computing and networking. NetSpeed’s configurable and synthesizable offerings will help Intel develop new SoCs more efficiently with an evolving set of IP. 

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NetSpeed Systems

NOD is a Human Computer Interaction (HCI) focused company specializing in Spatial Input. NOD’s Sensor Fusion platform fuses data from multiple sensors for immediate, precision motion tracking and natural, gesture-based navigation. Far reaching applications include drones, smart homes, and virtual reality.

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WekaIO has built the world’s fastest parallel file system on a new architecture optimized for NVMe-flash and hybrid cloud, and can meet the demands of modern workloads with the most I/O-intensive and extreme technical computing requirements. Weka’s file system, WekaFS, is designed to provide extreme performance at any scale, and is ideal for all I/O intensive workloads including machine learning, GPU acceleration, genomics, life sciences, financial analytics, log management and technical compute.  

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WekaIO

Altair Semiconductor develops high performance, single-mode LTE chipsets, with a range of reference hardware products, baseband processors, and RF transceivers. This portfolio covers broad cellular 4G market needs, from supercharged video-centric applications to ultra-low power, low cost IoT, and M2M.

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Altair’s portfolio covers the complete spectrum of cellular 4G market needs, from supercharged video-centric applications all the way to ultra-low power, low cost IoT and M2M.

Single-Mode LTE Chipsets

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Altair Semiconductor

Annapurna is a fabless semiconductor company serving the high performance Embedded and Data Center/cloud markets with a Platform-on-Chip approach. Annapurna optimizes cloud infrastructure performance and cost by moving the hypervisor and networking stack to a purpose-built hardware accelerator (ASIC).

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Annapurna Labs enabled the launch of blazing fast AWS virtual machines by allowing the Intel Xen hypervisor to be be replaced with a highly optimized KVM hypervisor tightly coupled with Annapurna's ASICs.

ASICs for Virtualization

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Annapurna Labs

Aquantia Corp. develops integrated, high-speed communication circuits for Ethernet connectivity, including products for cloud data centers, client connectivity and carrier access. Aquantia serves integrated circuit suppliers and original equipment/design manufacturers through worldwide direct sales. 

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Aquantia

Aura Semiconductors is a fabless IC design company providing high performance products in IoT radios, enterprise timing and portable audio markets. Aura's IoT radios and amplifiers provide superior RF performance and fidelity with ultra-low power consumption at less than half of the board area footprint.

Why we backed Aura Semiconductors?

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Aura Semiconductor

Timing ICs & Low Power RF designs (Bluetooth for IoT radios)

CNEX is a semiconductor company developing revolutionary NVMe and Open-Channel SSD controller ASICs that deliver high-performing, low and predictable latency, scalability, and flexibility for software-defined-storage. The company has partnered with leading solid-state storage manufacturers, and data center and systems customers. CNEX SSD controllers deliver high-performance with low and predictable latency, and provide flexibility for software-defined-storage with host-based FTL, and Ethernet I/O for storage fabric scalability.

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CNEX LABS

NVMe and Open-Channel SSD controller ASICs

Credo provides semiconductor solutions for the data center, enterprise networking, and high-performance computing markets. Their Serializer-Deserializer (SerDes) technology delivers the scalability and signal integrity for platforms requiring single-lane 25G, 50G, and 100G connectivity. 

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High-performance Semi for data center connectivity

Eta Compute is a semiconductor company focused on SoCs that bring machine intelligence to energy-constrained systems interconnected wirelessly. Energy efficient ASICs and novel neural network AI software address applications at the edge for Speech Recognition, Keyword Spotting, PPG applications, etc.

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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

Komprise builds software focused on intelligent data management. Their platform adds virtual data lake capability with a zero lock-in, zero-interference, storage agnostic software solution. Their automation software adapts and scales to the customer’s environment, eliminating the cost, complexity and disruption of legacy data management 

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LightBits builds hardware and software addressing the need for disaggregation in cloud-scale/hyperscale data centers. Their alternative solutions for disaggregation eliminate the need to change network infrastructure or affect data center clients. Lightbits' innovative NVMe/TCP solution provides up to 50% reduction in tail latency.

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Lightbits Labs

Lion is a semiconductor company developing battery management ICs using Switched-Capacitor technologies, enabling world-best efficiencies, lower heat dissipation, ultra-fast charging and smaller form factors. Lion has also developed the world's smallest, single-chip PMIC solution not requiring any discrete inductors.

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Lion Semiconductor

Localize.city is a real estate marketplace designed for everyone. Their AI-based “Insight Engine” analyzes thousands of datasets, uncovering critical information about every home in the market: the impact of future construction, pricing guidance, the amount of sunlight a home receives, and more.

Michael Marks

Prior Experience

Boards

Education

Focus Areas

Michael’s Perspectives

deep tech shines amid pandemic

Current Investments

Connect With Michael

Rest of the team

Lip-Bu Tan

Nicholas Brathwaite

Sriram Viswanathan

Sudhir Rao

Andrew Kau

Gani Subramaniam

Niel Ransom

Roni Hefetz

Steve Fu

Terry Gilton

Sarah Lucas

David Goldman

Shantanu Murti

Shrenik Kenia

Vishnu Das

Ajay Shah

Bill Moore

Dr. Paulraj Arogyaswami

Ravi Jacob

Matthew Marsh

Teresa Smith

Robin Clewley

Ganesh Krishnan

Joana Tieu

Vishal Nagar

Transforming potential into brilliance.