Shri Ganeshram
Founder of Awning
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Chief Executive Officer
2025 - Current
Advisor
2024
Advising post-acquisition & taking a much needed break to travel and work on hobbies, like making music.
CTO -> CEO / Founder
2019 - 2024
Acquired, April 2024. Founder, CTO (until summer 2021), then Founder, CEO & CTO (summer 2021 - April 2024). - Raised $11.3M in funding - Grew business to over $12M in annual revenue in a little over a year, after a pivot in 2023 - Led product, engineering, data, growth, and operations teams during entire course of business - Led business through an acquisition from RedAwning - Built the most accurate predictions of rents and airbnb revenues for homes across the united states - Grew site traffic to over 100K visitors / month (substantial % of real estate investors in the country) - Grew sales organic lead pipeline to larger than any other company, including publicly traded competitors, in one year using product-led SEO efforts, heavily leaning on proprietary data and AI -- this led to our acquisition - Operationalized, globally outsourced, and automated a vacation rental management operation, using a combination of technology, teams in Mexico and the Philippines, and AI - Operationalized a remote real estate brokerage doing $100M in deals - Built the most analytical real estate search engine on the market, building our own complex data processing stack using technologies like Redshift, Airflow, and Elasticsearch - Built and grew a world-class team across all functions
Seed Investor
2014
I was the first investor in Eaze. Fresh VC led Eaze's seed round. We went on to invest in multiple rounds following.
SVP Technology & Data / Founding Team
2015 - 2019
I led the 50+ person Product and Engineering team at Eaze (encompasses Product, Engineering, Analytics, and IT). Earlier during my time at Eaze, I had the opportunity to build and lead our highly analytical Growth, Lifecycle Marketing, Driver Operations, and Supply Chain teams. Achievements: - Overseeing cross-functional growth team leading company from $3M to $250M in annual revenue & adequate driver supply - Driving cost per delivery down by over 50% and achieving 90%+ delivery time goals through data science-driven planning efforts - Cleaning up our supply chain (menu outages & oversupply) through automation of order management and forecasting models - Launching novel growth strategies: EazeMD -- telehealth cannabis card, Billboards -- that were performance driven, Ambassador program, Circumventing social media blocks on advertising - Leading analytics, reporting, and data room / deck creation for fundraises yielding over $200M for the company / helping the company build investor pipeline using personal network and participating in pitches - Attend and report in board meetings - Leading reporting and strategy for executive team meetings - Led the implementation of our data warehouse and analytics infrastructure -- using technologies like Airflow & Redshift -- we were the first production Airflow user outside of Airbnb! - Building out our lifecycle marketing program and algorithmically delivering promotions to balance supply and demand in the marketplace - Scaling driver acquisition program - Scaling engineering systems to support millions of deliveries a year - Recruiting and growing a world class team
Eaze is an online marketplace and technology platform that helps provide legal access to cannabis through safe and convenient delivery.
Raised $212,500,000.00 from DCM Ventures, FJ Labs and Rose Capital.
Managing Partner & Founder
2013
Fresh VC is currently not making investments in new portfolio companies. Brian and I still advise companies in our portfolio, manage our active investments, and sometimes syndicate investments into our existing portfolio. Fresh VC is a micro VC fund started by Shri Ganeshram and Brian Sheng. Fresh VC primarily invests in seed stage technology startups. The Fresh VC portfolio includes high growth companies like Eaze, Fiscal Note, Radar, Akido Labs, Eight Sleep, and Aptible.
Fresh VC is a micro VC fund started by Shri Ganeshram and Brian Sheng.
Advisor
2022
Mortgage as a service platform.
Building the mortgage-as-a-service infrastructure platform
Raised $8,500,000.00 from Citi Ventures and Citi SPRINT.
DJ / Music Producer
1994
soundcloud.com/shri-bear Music is a passion and hobby of mine. I grew up playing the violin, viola, and euphonium. I spent my year off honing my electronic music production skills. Since then, I've developed a deep love for electronic music. I have DJ'd at a number of amazing venues. - DISTRIKT, Discow, MAXA, Headspace, and more at Burning Man - Superior Ingredients & Musica in New York - Public Works, Great Northern, Monarch, The Midway, Audio, and more in San Francisco - Concourse Project in Austin - El Ganzo in Cabo - Future Factory in Los Angeles
Seed Investor
2015
I was one of the first investors in Akido Labs. Followed on in the Series A.
Seed Investor
2013
RADAR is an RFID and computer vision platform that automates inventory management, analytics, and checkout in physical stores.
Raised $89,401,385.00 from Beanstalk Ventures, Pathfinder, Sound Ventures, Y Combinator, Novel TMT Ventures, The Ferrante Group, Future Archives Unlimited, LLC, NTT DoCoMo and Align Ventures.
Seed Investor
2014
Empowering developers to focus on ideas, not infrastructure
Raised $12,120,000.00 from Tamarind Hill, Maverick Ventures, Western Technology Investment and Thrive Capital.
Seed Investor
2014
Conveyor is a SaaS platform helping companies speed through their customer security reviews (with a little help from AI)
Raised $19,000,000.00 from Cervin Ventures and Alumni Ventures.