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Silicon Valley’s EdTech Problem
Talks about Education, Edtech and Disruption
VI
Vinay Iyengar
Investor
San Francisco, California
Overview
Vinay Iyengar is a Partner at Foundation Capital, where he serves as an Executive in Residence and has held roles on multiple boards of directors. With a background in venture capital and extensive experience in software development, he has made significant investments in startups like Wander and has worked with notable companies such as Fortanix and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Work Experience
Angel Investor
2018 - Current
Lucky to be a personal investor in companies such as: - ACV Auctions (NASDAQ: ACVA) - Auth0 (acq. by Okta for $6.5b) - Axonius - Backbone - Canva - Dashlane - Discord - Eggnog AI - Emergence Software - Guild Education - Habana Labs (acq. by Intel for $2b) - Hashicorp (NASDAQ: HCP) - Jemi (acq. by Brat TV) - LaunchDarkly - Melio - Orbital (withorbital.com) - PagerDuty (NYSE: PD) - Pipedrive (acq. by Vista for $1.5b) - Procore (NYSE: PCOR) - ReflexAI - Rocket Lab (NASDAQ: RKLB) - Rundoo - ServiceTitan - Spark Systems (sparkhq.ai) - Talisman AI - Toast (NYSE: TOST) - Verse Medical - Viva Republica (dba Toss) - Wander.com - Zapier
Advisory Board Member
2021
Member, STEM Advisory Committee. NAF is one of the country's largest education non-profits, transforming the high school experience for 100k+ students every year.
Partner
2023 - 2024
Leading early-stage investments. Run the firm's data/ML infrastructure and climate practice areas.
Executive in Residence
2023 - 2023
Originally joined the Foundation team part-time as an XIR. Served as interim VP of BizOps & Strategy at Fortanix, a cyber security company incubated by Foundation. Later transitioned back into a full-time investing role.
Foundation Capital is a venture capital firm made up of former entrepreneurs and helps companies and businesses grow.
Board of Directors
2020 - 2023
Empowering companies to hire the best talent, anywhere. Led seed round. Now valued at ~$3b.
Remote offers payroll, tax, HR, and compliance solutions for distributed teams.
Raised $496,000,000.00 from 9Yards Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund, Two Sigma Ventures, General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Gaingels, Base Partners, Adams Street Partners, Sequoia Capital and Flat Capital.
Principal
2020 - 2023
Helped start Two Sigma’s West Coast venture team and grow the firm to ~$2b AUM. Led Seed -> Series B investments with a focus on ML, developer tools, cloud/data infrastructure and vertical SaaS.
Two Sigma Ventures is an early-stage venture capital fund that invests in companies run by highly driven people.
Venture & Growth Investing
2017 - 2020
Sourced/supported investments in Astorian (seed), Coder (series A), Shopmonkey (series B), PagerDuty (growth) and Upside (growth). PagerDuty is now a ~$3b publicly traded company and Upside was most recently valued at ~$1.5b. Started the Bessemer Fellows program: https://www.bvp.com/bessemer-fellows/ Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP) is the oldest venture capital firm in the country. We’ve funded 1 in 5 cloud software IPOs and have helped build the likes of LinkedIn, Twilio, Yelp, Skype, Shopify and Pinterest among many others.
BVP Forge operates as a private equity firm that focuses on software-enabled businesses.
Quantitative Trading
2016 - 2016
Equity derivatives trading (single stock and index volatility)
Goldman Sachs is a multinational financial services firm providing securities, investment banking, and management services.
Co-Founder
2015 - 2016
My first (failed) venture Retask tried to fix email and task management through NLP. Incubated in the Fall 2015 cohort at the Harvard Innovation Lab.
Machine Learning Engineer
2015 - 2015
New Technology Group
An ecosystem of software & hardware vendors, integrators and solution providers focused on adoption of NFV and SDN-based solutions.
Math/Computer Science Research
2011 - 2014
Sent a lot of cold emails and eventually ended up working under the direction of Dr. Neal Koblitz (inventor of elliptic curve cryptography). Worked on new algorithms for elliptic curve scalar multiplication and finite field arithmetic. Sole author on 2 peer-reviewed publications in international journals.