GFT Ventures Q4 2022 Update
Welcome to the Q4 2022 newsletter from GFT Ventures! We hope you will benefit from our fund updates and portfolio company highlights, as well as our overall industry observations and thought leadership exchanges. Please feel free to share our newsletter with your colleagues and friends using the “Share” button at the bottom of this post. Any additional questions or comments may be directed to team@gft.vc. And you can always visit our GFT Ventures website to learn more about us.
GFT Ventures Fund I - Well Positioned for Current Environment
This past quarter was a busy and exciting one for GFT Ventures Fund I. Our first ever Annual Meeting on October 27th at the Battery in San Francisco was a huge success with a great turnout – a big thank you to everyone who attended and supported us. Some of the photos taken throughout the day are included below. On the fundraising front, we are excited to report that we had an additional Fund I closing at the end of September 2022, and have since signed more commitments, bringing our total fund size over $120M. Although we are now well oversubscribed from our initial $100 million target, our charter allows us to receive commitments up to a cap of $150 million. Given that we have continued interest from new LPs, we continue to fundraise on a very selective basis and anticipate our final closing in the coming months.
A number of you have asked us how we are approaching what’s now become a very uncertain economic environment, characterized by increasing volatility across almost all asset classes. In general, we feel extremely well positioned to not just weather (but, in fact, to capitalize on) the current capital markets downturn. The extremely fortunate timing of our fundraise has left our fund holding largely “dry powder” just at the time when startup valuations are reverting to more historically normal (i.e. much more attractive) levels. At the same time, our existing portfolio is performing quite well, with three “write-ups",” and we have recently closed on a new investment in a data engineering automation company called Switchboard (more details below). Finally, we are working very closely with all of our existing portfolio companies to not only assure their success, but also to maximize their opportunities, despite any economic headwinds they will encounter.
Thank you again for your generous support of GFT Ventures. As mentioned at our Annual Meeting, our original GFT Ventures Frontier Technology thesis remains well intact. And we continue to see exponential growth opportunities ahead of us in our core focus areas – AI, Data Science and Blockchain. We love what we do, and we do it with passion. And we couldn’t be more excited to be sharing this journey with such a quality and dedicated group of supporters.
Best regards,
Jeff Herbst and Jay Eum
Founding Managing Partners, GFT Ventures
Featured Portfolio Companies
GFT Ventures Takes Lead in Switchboard’s Series A Round
What it does:
Switchboard Software is a data engineering automation platform that enables revenue and marketing teams to use data to drive outcomes fast, without burdening their tech teams. Within a typical consumer-first enterprise, each team typically creates their own “data silo,” which ultimately gets pushed to, and aggregated, in a single data lake (e.g. Snowflake or BigQuery). But each data silo requires incrementally more technical resources to maintain (which is unscalable), and the end user has no influence or control over the content and format of the data needed to make a business decision. This has become a huge problem, which Switchboard elegantly solves by putting the business user (as opposed to the data analyst) in charge of the enterprise data lifecycle. Essentially, Switchboard creates a “supply chain” of data to the enterprise, resulting in immediate ROI through more effective analytics and business decision making at lower overall costs.
Why we found it exciting:
Consumer-first companies are currently drowning in data from multiple sources. The overall market for big data analytics has been estimated at $30B+, and we believe Switchboard’s CEO Ju-kay Kwek truly understands the big opportunity here based on his own experience of founding and launching Google BigQuery. Ju-Kay and his CTO / Co-Founder Michael Manoochehri have been working together since 2015 to solve the huge disconnect between the ultimate business users of data and the data analysts who are collecting and preparing the data. The customer testimonials that we gathered during our diligence process were some of the most compelling we’ve ever heard, and we are excited to support Switchboard on their path to become the leading data engineering automation platform.
GFT Ventures in the Spotlight
GFT Ventures Successfully Hosted its First Annual Meeting
GFT Ventures’ very first Annual Meeting, held on October 27th at The Battery in San Francisco, was a huge success with over 60 attendees from across the globe. This included representatives from all eight of GFT’s current portfolio companies. We enjoyed seeing all of you there, and trust you found it productive and enjoyable to engage with our entire team, get updates on GFT Ventures' strategy and performance, and connect with founders and other investors in our network.
GFT Ventures Hosts Another Successful Global AI Council Event
On September 20th, GFT Ventures hosted a select group of senior AI industry leaders at the residence of GFT Founding Managing Partner, Jeff Herbst. This Global AI Council event, which has now become a fundamental component of the Global Corporate Venturing (GCV) network, was moderated / coordinated by Jeff and co-sponsored by Fenwick and Silicon Valley Bank. It included three engaging and insightful roundtable discussions around the topics of Conversational AI, Data Science, and AI hardware/system trends and developments. The attendees included senior leaders from AMD, Citi, In-Q-Tel, Lockheed, Nvidia, Qualcomm and Xerox, as well as CEOs from some of the most interesting and exciting AI & Data Science startups including Deepgram, d-Matrix, Groq, Gretel.ai and TigerGraph. The participants were treated to evening reception catered by PastaRey Foods, prepared using an outdoor kitchen and wood-fired pizza oven. Special thanks to Christina Riboldi and Janice Mawson of GCV, Mark Leahy from Fenwick, and Gerald Brady from SVB for collaborating with us to produce and sponsor this fantastic event. A few pictures are included below.
GFT Ventures Co-Hosts AI Roundtable Dinner with Mirae Asset and Foley
On September 6th, GFT Ventures co-hosted an intimate dinner and discussion with VCs and startups around various AI-related topics. Under the backdrop of the wine cellar at The Battery in San Francisco (see picture below), the dialogue ranged from the current state of the capital markets and AI startup ecosystem (including recent funding valuations), to AI for healthcare, to AI use by government and defense customers. We are extremely grateful to Mirae Asset (one of GFT’s anchor LPs) and Foley for co-sponsoring and organizing this event with us. In addition to GFT Ventures, participants included investors from GSR, In-Q-Tel and Mirae, as well as the CEOs of leading AI companies at various stages, such as H20.ai, TigerGraph, Zero Cognitive Systems and Mperativ.