Circular 331 Partners
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Tag Archives: BDL
Ville Miettinen – Microtask – Finland
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Ville is a serial entrepreneur and an angel investor. The last couple of years he has been particularly interested in crowdsourcing, cloud labor, and human computation — disruptive technologies that are transforming the way people work all over the world.
A hacker at heart, he has spent way too many years banging out code in assembler, C, and other languages used by real cowboys. He’s got a long background in computer graphics, and was the CTO and one of the founders of Hybrid Graphics, a pioneer in real-time 3D graphics technologies. They created some of the very first commercial 3D engines and licensed them to games companies all over the world. He was the co-author of the SurRender3D engine & Umbra visibility optimization middleware.
Later on, they wrote the first implementations of OpenGL ES, OpenVG, JSR-184 and other graphics standards, and licensed them to hundreds of millions of embedded devices in the mobile phone and automotive industries. Hybrid was acquired by NVIDIA in 2006.
These days he’s the CEO & founder at Microtask.
He is an angel investor, board member and advisor in several graphics technology, crowdsourcing & games companies in Europe and Silicon Valley. He is actively involved in the Northern European start-up scene, mentoring start-ups at, e.g., Startup Sauna, GameFounders, Nestholma, Founder Institute and HackFwd.
In his free time, he travels around the planet, and over the years have become a semi-professional photographer.
How do VCs look for Success Stories?
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To help entrepreneurs get an idea on how VCs look for the next success stories, we approached two VC firms in Lebanon, Berytech and Leap Ventures.
Berytech:
Berytech was established in 2001 and is the oldest firm in Lebanon to provide support to startups. It has since grown through the years to become an ecosystem of 3 incubators, 3 finds, 1 accelerator, and coworking support spaces.
Berytech is an exciting community of entrepreneurs who support each other and grow. They provide business support at the different growth stages of the startup, flexible worry-free hosting services where the startups can plug and play and expand flexibly.
When looking for success stories, Berytech believes that Lebanon is filled with lots of great human talent who are often hidden or worried to go through the risky entrepreneurial path. Berytech is there to help them figure out if the path is right for them and to support them every step of the way in terms of training and coaching.
Check their website to learn more.
Leap Ventures:
Leap Ventures was founded in 2014 as a venture capital firm specializing in investments in startups. The firm is based in Beirut and is also located in Dubai. It invests in the MENA region with a focus on Lebanon.
Leap ventures was formed by a team of serial entrepreneurs who have decades of startup experience under their belt. They can support entrepreneurs through funding, strategy training, providing operational resources, marketing expertise, global connections, and more.
To find the next success stories, they leverage their extensive entrepreneurial experience: engaging with promising entrepreneurs, providing fresh views and strategic opportunities, and planning for transformative growth.
Liz Fleming – South Summit – Madrid
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Liz has spent most of her career in the early stage venture capital industry. Starting out as an investment advisor with Enterprise Ireland, a public VC investing €40m per annum into 70+ startups following on as programme manager at HBAN, Ireland´s national business angel network, establishing 7 business angel syndicates across the country with an investment capacity of approx. €20m.
As deputy director for the Venture Lab at IE Business School (ranked No.1 in Europe, 13 worldwide by FT ´13) Liz was responsible for accelerating 50 teams and spinning out on average 10 start ups per year connecting teams to over €15m in capital. As managing director of the Venture Network, a weekly pitch slam event, Liz built a community of over 1200 entrepreneurs with 350+ startups pitching to 50+ investors over 3 years. Liz also launched editions of the Venture Network in 11 cities across Spain and internationally in Bogota, Medellin, Johannesburg, Helsinki, Taipei, & Tel Aviv.
While at IE Liz helped design and implement the Spain Startup Co-investment Fund, a €40m seed fund run in collaboration with Enisa, Spain´s leading government agency for innovation. Liz also sat on the steering committee of the Startup Europe Partnership, a platform for scaling startups in Europe launched by the EU Commission.
Now as VP International for Spain Startup, Liz´s goal is to showcase the talent and innovation coming out of Southern Europe, the Mediterranean, and Latin America at The South Summit, one of Europe’s leading startup conferences. Liz is Spain´s only Kauffman Fellow and was listed as one of Europe’s Top 100 Women in Tech by GirlsInTech, and one of the Top 100 Women in Tech on Twitter by Business Insider.
Sanjay Sabnani – CrowdGather – Los Angeles
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Prior to founding and taking CrowdGather public, Sabnani was an accomplished senior executive at several dynamic public companies in the technology and medical sectors. He has extensive deal making and transactional expertise having been involved in significant equity and debt capital raises. Sabnani is also a former financier and securities principal with extensive capital market relationships.
Sanjay Sabnani has also served as Chairman of the Board for Artwallah and TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) Southern California, both non-profits.
He is published in two medical text book chapters as the only non M.D. or PhD contributor, and has authored and received patents based upon his understanding of the GABAa receptor complex and its implication in anxiety, addictive, and eating disorders.
On the rare occasion that he has spare time, Sabnani is focused on writing a book about his theories on the biological underpinnings of anxiety from a systems approach.