PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--SAV (Scale Asia Ventures), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, has launched its $30M inaugural early-stage fund in commitments to support enterprise-focused companies globally. Beyond early-stage funding, SAV also plans to fuel its portfolios with additional $100M later-stage funding directly from its deep-pocketed Limited Partner base. Fund backers include institutional funds, prominent family offices, and publicly-traded conglomerates in U.S as well as S. Korea, Japan and Singapore. SAV is committed to provide its portfolios with strong U.S. and Asia market expertise and a unique global network of strategic corporate partners.
“SAV invests into technologies that bring intelligence to essential industries. Post pandemic, we envision strong tailwinds for expat founders to build global businesses with distributed teams. Being in Silicon Valley with a global expertise, we want to help them from zero to IPO,” said Wally Wang, Founding Partner.
SAV’s Founding Partner Wally began his career as PM at Microsoft Bing. He later built data platforms at Pebble (Y Combinator W11) and Misfit, both of which were merged as critical infrastructure into Google’s Wear OS. Wally has spent close to a decade in enterprise software space as an operator in both U.S. and Asia, including Lattice Engines in martech (acq. by NYSE: DNB) and DataVisor in cybersecurity (Sequoia & NEA-backed). Before launching SAV, Wally has been advising family offices and conglomerates on software investments and serving on the boards of portfolios with roughly $300M in capital deployed. Some of his notable deals include: Talkdesk, VAST Data, Nucleai, Qventus, Uhnder, AppZen, CloudVector (acq. by NASDAQ: IMPV), etc. He was a visiting scholar at Carnegie Mellon University and studied in the PhD program at NYU Stern School of Business.
SAV’s venture partner team includes seasoned executives with deep domain expertise across industry leaders like Google Cloud, Merck, Samsung, Splunk, Amgen, Palo Alto Networks, F5, Hyundai, BMS, Dell, Kakao, Bespin Global and Stanford Medical School. More to be found here on SAV’s team.
“Wally has been integral towards thought leadership in enterprise software, especially in the AI/ML space, and mentoring alumni entrepreneurs with his deep technical experience in operations and global industry insights from the cross-border business community,” said SAV’s scientific advisor and Limited Partner Anindya Ghose, the Heinz Riehl Chair Professor of Business at NYU Stern School of Business.
Some notable SAV’s existing portfolio companies include:
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Enterprise Software:
- Nylas – communications APIs for workflow automation and digital experiences
- Metadata – operating system for B2B marketers
- Molecula – feature store as a service
- Superconductive – open-source data quality tool
- Pangea Cyber – uniting security for app builders
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Life Science/BioTech:
- Kernal Bio – onco-selective mRNA
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Frontier Technologies:
- Golden – a decentralized canonical knowledge graph
More to be found here on portfolio companies.
“Scale Asia Ventures and Wally’s robust operator network have been instrumental to Nylas’ growth. Their support, technical expertise, and understanding of our product market fit have helped us to build and nurture connections with key partners, customers, and more,” said Gleb Polyakov, Co-Founder & CEO of Nylas.
“We feel very lucky to work with SAV and value their deep expertise up and down the modern data stack, their GTM perspective, and most importantly their global network of customers, investors, and talent,” said Higinio O. Maycotte, CEO of Molecula.
“We’re excited to welcome SAV to our cap table. Their support goes beyond capital as they brought in corporate and investor networks to help our business thrive and cross pollinate with their other portfolio companies,” said Gil Allouche, CEO of Metadata.
