Led · Series A · Jan 2021

TMYTEK develops testing products for 5G millimeter-wave hardware, most notably the BBox beamforming box and the XBeam production test solution. The BBox creates 16 beams and lets users control amplitude and phase via software; the company says it can save researchers up to 80% in time and cost. The XBeam, prototyped in 2019 and commercialized in November 2020, electronically scans beams for module, smartphone and base-station testing and is claimed to be up to 20× faster than traditional solutions. TMYTEK has delivered about 30 sets of its equipment to clients including KDDI, SoftBank, Fujitsu, several Fortune 500 companies and research institutions. The startup leverages manufacturing partners such as Inventec and factories in Vietnam, Thailand and China, and has participated in SparkLabs Taipei. It plans to raise a Series B to develop and commercialize its own base stations and has joined the O-RAN Alliance to support interoperable mobile networks.

Participated · Series B · Jan 2016

Qeexo is a Mountain View, CA-based provider of human-computer interaction technologies for mobile and other touch devices. Led by CEO Sang Won Lee and spun out of Carnegie Mellon University, the company has developed FingerSense, a patented technology that distinguishes fingertip, knuckle, nail, or stylus input. FingerSense analyzes the unique acoustic signature of physical objects to identify what is touching the screen and can be deployed on mobile devices without the extra cost or space of additional hardware. The technology has been deployed on millions of devices worldwide. Qeexo recently secured $4.5m in Series B funding and will use the proceeds to invest in hiring, operations, and R&D. The company is actively hiring. Qeexo develops touch technologies centered on its patented FingerSense software, which can distinguish fingertip, knuckle, nail and stylus inputs. FingerSense was developed by a research team at Carnegie Mellon University led by Qeexo CTO Chris Harrison. The company is led by CEO Sang Won Lee and CTO Chris Harrison. Qeexo closed a $2.3M Series A and intends to use the funds to expand its engineering and business development teams and begin deploying FingerSense. It is in discussions with multiple mobile device manufacturers to embed FingerSense into devices or license the software. The company is based in San Jose, California.

Participated · Series A · Oct 2014

Idibon provides a platform that helps companies understand and analyze their language data using natural language processing and data science. Its product supports NER/text extraction, sentiment analysis, text/content categorization, and language detection/identification. The platform is multilingual and handles over 50 languages, including English, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, Dutch, Russian, Swedish, Italian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Hindi and Bengali. Idibon was launched in January 2014 by Robert Munro (CEO) and is based in San Francisco, CA. The company raised a $5.5M Series A and intends to use the funds to expand operations. As part of the financing, Vadim Tarasov from Altpoint will join Khosla on Idibon’s board of directors. Idibon builds NLP technology to help companies understand language data by turning unstructured sources into structured answers to business-intelligence questions. The company processes emails, instant messages and social media to extract actionable insights. Idibon intends to use the funds to continue developing its technology. The startup raised $1.4M from Khosla Ventures. As part of the investment, Sven Strohband, Partner and CTO at Khosla Ventures, will join Idibon’s board of directors. Leadership includes Robert Munro (CEO), Schuyler Erle (CTO), Christopher Walker (Chief Data Officer) and Tyler Schnoebelen (Senior Data Scientist).