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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 1) - Sramana Mitra

Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures, discusses his firm’s successes as well as its investment thesis. Vertical Cloud is one of the key ones with an emphasis on Enterprise Data Platforms.

Sramana Mitra: You have big news. Let’s catch up.

Yanev Suissa: We did big closings on our third fund. Our performance has been top 5 percentile in the industry. We’ve been doing a great job. Things have been chugging along at SineWave.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the third fund?

Yanev Suissa: We’re in the middle of the first closing and the final closing. It’ll be around $150 million in the end.

Sramana Mitra: Since you’ve been doing this for some time now, why don’t we start with some of your big successes? Let’s start with the case studies of what you have been successful with. Tell us about how these people came to you. When did you meet them? At what stage and what was it about them that caught your attention to begin with?

Yanev Suissa: I’ll break that up into little parts and go through it. We invest in commercial enterprise tech – so data, cloud, security, systems, and infrastructure. You’ll see most of our companies are of that nature. We help open up commercial verticals. These are like baby Microsofts, but they could also be big commercial companies with public sector revenue streams.

We have a very concentrated portfolio. We only do about four or five deals a year. We’re very picky about how we find and select those deals. A lot of people know Databricks. They’re expected to be one of the biggest tech IPOs ever. Another example is SentinelOne which was the biggest cyber-IPO ever. They went public earlier in the year. We also had a physical security company called Evolve go public.

We have another company, Rescale, that’s on a public path. We had an acquisition with JUMP Bikes. Our fund two companies are doing really well as well. We have a thermo-plastics printing company called AON3D that’s broken out of the gates. In the agriculture vertical, cloud agronomics is doing fantastic.

Those deals have come to us in different ways. A lot of people think that VCs just share deals with each other. We do but usually less from that vein because you’re usually not showing the one that’s the best.

Most of our deal flow comes from other entrepreneurs that we’ve invested in or some of the corporate and public sector relationships we work with. As part of SineWave, we have partnerships and relationships with some of the big Fortune 500 and also government agencies of different types. We use them in diligence. We talk to them about where their businesses are doing. They will often say, “We’ve seen this great company.” That’s how we met SentinelOne. We had a thesis on endpoint security before it was popular.

SineWave is a very thesis-focused place that helps narrow our universe. We have a vision of where the world is going to be in several years. Then we backtrack from there to say, “What are the foundational technologies you need in order for the world to operate that way?” We target endpoint security.

We target a real-time streaming analytics thesis. We’re looking for that. That deal came to us because Databricks was trying to do a deal with the intelligence community. They were speaking a different language. Both the intelligence community and the VCs at that time said, “You should talk to SineWave.” That’s how we got to Databricks.

The most important part though, especially at the early stages, is to build that relationship pre-financing. Sometimes it happens during the financing but we try to really get exposure to how the entrepreneur thinks, are you on the same wavelength for the company’s vision? Is this a defensible technology? Can it distinguish itself from a product-market perspective? Is the entrepreneur coachable? Can we help you? Those are key questions.



This post first appeared on One Million By One Million, please read the originial post: here

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 1) - Sramana Mitra

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