Participated · Equity · Feb 2025

Nirmata builds Policy-as-Code solutions, including Nirmata Control Hub, to automate security, governance, and compliance across cloud-native and hybrid infrastructures. The platform leverages AI to automatically generate, test, enforce policies and remediate critical issues for platform engineering and security teams. Nirmata is powered by Kyverno, an open-source Kubernetes policy engine that has surpassed 3.2 billion downloads and is a top CNCF project. The company reported a 10X increase in annual revenues for its policy and governance products in 2024 and counts customers such as LinkedIn, Deutsche Telekom and Wayfair. Nirmata says it will scale product development and go-to-market to serve as a centralized hub for security automation from code to cloud. The company maintains a presence in the US and India and has received industry recognition such as CNCF Top 20 contributor and Cybersecurity Excellence Awards. Nirmata offers a unified management plane for Kubernetes clusters and workloads, built to help enterprise DevOps teams with self-service cluster provisioning, visibility, health, metrics, alerts, compliance and application deployments. Its core product ecosystem centers on Kyverno, a policy engine for Kubernetes that provides native tools and language to secure containerized resources. Kyverno has seen significant adoption growth—since early 2021 it surpassed six million downloads—and is used by customers such as Novartis, The New York Times, Duke Energy, TriNet and Grofers as well as open source projects like Flux and KubeArmor. In May 2021 Nirmata launched the Policy Manager for Kyverno (PMK) to simplify multi-cluster adoption and enable Policy-as-Code via GitOps workflows. The company plans to use new funding to accelerate Kyverno’s growth, scale product and operations to support the Kyverno community, establish an engineering team in India, and expand sales and marketing to drive adoption. Led by CEO Jim Bugwadia, Nirmata is positioning itself to capture enterprise demand as organizations accelerate Kubernetes and cloud deployments.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2024

Clientell builds a revenue operations and sales-execution platform that uses AI to boost productivity, streamline processes, and improve CRM data quality. The product provides insights and tools for forecast accuracy, pipeline analysis, and CRM automation. The company has partnered with growth-stage SaaS companies and large pharmaceutical firms as initial design partners and early adopters. Clientell plans to use new funding to strengthen its product and expand its team. The company was founded in 2021 and is focused on making forecasting and pipeline assessment easier for enterprises. It recently completed a seed financing that supports its near-term product and go-to-market plans.

Led · Seed · Jul 2022

qiibee is a blockchain-based B2B rewards marketplace headquartered in Zug, Switzerland. Founded by brothers Gabriele and Gianluca Giancola, the platform offers instant access to brands, thousands of rewards, crypto, NFTs and millions of new members. Loyalty programs that connect with qiibee benefit from partner integration, no reconciliation costs, increased security and improved customer engagement and new member acquisition. In 2021 the company launched its first connection between different loyalty programs with Swiss watchmaker Louis Erard, enabling members to exchange Louis Erard Points to Etihad Guest miles and nine cryptocurrencies. The company raised $4.8M in a seed funding round and intends to use the proceeds to grow its global team and expand into priority markets such as North America. qiibee built a decentralized loyalty platform and developer interface on Ethereum that lets brands tokenize loyalty applications and issue transferable QBX tokens. The platform aims to improve data security, lower management costs, and remove central data authorities and liabilities associated with traditional loyalty models. qiibee removes the need for brands to develop smart contracts or perform blockchain integrations by providing the infrastructure for tokenized loyalty. The solution has been deployed with its first client, Lattesso, to reward customers across seven countries and allow exchange of loyalty tokens for other brand tokens, crypto, or domestic currencies. A strategic partnership with MindNow is intended to bring more retail, financial, tourism and lifestyle brands onto the platform. Financially, qiibee has completed a seed financing and recently raised additional capital through a token sale.

Participated · Seed · May 2021

Based in Palo Alto, ArmorCode offers an Agentic AI Platform that aggregates and prioritizes security findings across applications, code, cloud, infrastructure and AI systems, enabling security teams to move from fragmented data to policy-driven, auditable remediation. Its solutions span Application Security Posture Management, Vulnerability Management, Software Supply Chain Security, and the newly announced AI Exposure Management product. The platform processes more than 200 billion findings annually through hundreds of native integrations and is already used by Fortune 500, Fortune 1000 and Global 2000 enterprises. Nearly 80 percent of existing customers are driving the company to deepen its AI security capabilities, and the business has doubled year-over-year. Future plans include expanding the Agentic AI Platform via the Anya Agentic Framework, broadening MCP server support, and growing global go-to-market and partner programs across North America and EMEA. The company has now raised a total of $81 million to fund these initiatives and recently added noted cybersecurity leader Phil Venables to its board.

Led · Seed · Apr 2021

Prescient Devices provides a distributed low-code software platform that enables enterprise engineers, system integrators, and data scientists to build sensor-to-cloud IoT and edge computing solutions. The platform supports solution templates from the sensor to the cloud for remote monitoring and industrial automation, allowing businesses to deploy on day one and then scale and customize as needed. The company targets manufacturing, smart buildings, energy, utilities and intelligent transportation verticals. Led by co-founder and CEO Andy Wang, Prescient maintains an advisory board of technologists and business leaders in AI and IoT and plans to add key industry leaders to its Board, including Professor Charles Sodini (MIT) and Saqib Syed. Prescient closed a $2M financing round and intends to use the funds to expand its low-code IoT SaaS solution and ramp up sales and marketing programs.