Investors

Canvas Venture Fund

Canvas is a Menlo Park-based venture capital firm focused on making early-stage investments in software and services. Spun out from Morgenthaler Ventures in August 2013, Canvas was initially managed by Rebecca Lynn, Gary Little and Gary Morgenthaler. Paul Hsiao joined as general partner in May 2014. Previous to Canvas, these partners led early investments in companies such as Lending Club, Evernote, Siri, Houzz, MuleSoft, Elance-oDesk, Practice Fusion, and Doximity. Canvas has made the following investments since raising its inaugural fund: Viewics, HealthLoop, CrowdFlower, FutureAdvisor and Totango. With its thesis-based approach to investing, Canvas continues to establish itself as the go-to VC firm for digital health, financial services, marketplaces, enterprise SaaS, big data, and machine learning.

AME Cloud Ventures LLC

AME Cloud Ventures is the venture fund led by Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! AME Cloud Ventures focuses on seed to later stage companies building infrastructure and value chains around data. They love technology heavy companies gathering or creating unique data at every stage of the data stack — from infrastructure all the way to applications, mobile, and sensors. AME believes great people are the key to a company’s success and strives to find, fund, and support true entrepreneurs. They provide a unique and genuine set of resources to our founding teams, from strong operational and business experience, to networks of amazing mentors and international partners, particularly China.

Morado Venture Partners L.P.

Morado Venture Fund is led by Ash Patel and Michael Marquez. Ash was a long-time product, engineering leader and Chief Technology Evangelist with Yahoo! Inc. Michael is a founding partner at CODE Advisors, a Silicon Valley-based investment bank focused on the consumer Internet sector. At Morado, they believe the real power of the web will be unleashed over the next 10 years. Today’s web is just scratching the surface of its potential. Morado looks for bright, passionate teams who are taking big leaps. While there may be value in creating something that’s incrementally better, that type of advance is not their focus. They are committed to investing in companies with fundamentally disruptive, consumer-oriented Internet business models in four key areas: cloud infrastructure; mobile and app infrastructure; marketplaces; and social applications.

Morado makes seed-stage investments of approximately $150K, and partner with a syndicate of other seed-stage investors. Their experience growing disruptive, Internet-powered businesses enables them to provide advice and connections that can help accelerate the efforts of their investments.

Farzad (Zod) Nazem

Farzad (Zod) Nazem has been a prolific angel investor and advisor to tech startup companies since his retirement from Yahoo! in 2007. He has invested in more than 60 early stage companies, and sits on the boards of Hand Foundation, and The Nueva School. His area of investment is about two thirds Big Data and Cloud platforms, and one third Health and Medical.

He was the Executive Vice President of Engineering and Chief Technology Officer of Yahoo from 1996 to mid 2007. He helped acquire and integrate over 50 companies and managed over six thousand engineers representing half of the company’s employees. Between 1985 and 1996, Mr. Nazem held various software development and management positions at Oracle Corporation culminating in his role as Vice President of Media and Web Server Division. His tenure at Oracle also included membership in the company’s Product Division Management Committee, which set overall strategy for Oracle products. Previously, Mr. Nazem was recruited from California Polytechnic State University by Rolm Corporation to be a software engineer in the VLCBX division. At age 19, he earned a B.S. degree in Computer Science with highest honors.