Last week, we announced that Baiyin Zhou joined Ascent Venture Partners as our newest senior associate. This is particularly exciting because adding to our team is the most important thing we do – and it’s not something we do often. Baiyin is our first new investment team member in 10 years. At Ascent, we treat […]
I’m excited to announce Ascent’s newest portfolio company, Sidecar, the leader in programmatic, product-level advertising. We at Ascent have been active investors in the ad tech space with companies like Bizo (acquired by LinkedIn for $175M) and StartApp (Deloitte’s #1 fastest growing tech company in the US ). We’ve seen the power of advanced analytics […]
Today I’m happy to announce Ascent’s newest portfolio company, RapidMiner. In leading the $15M Series B financing of RapidMiner, we are following through on an investment theme I’ve been pursuing for several years – bringing advanced analytics to the business analyst. As we’ve all seen, there’s been tremendous hype around big data, but unfortunately many […]
In recent posts we’ve discussed how the shift to the cloud, the explosion of mobile usage, and the massive growth in data will help drive the next wave of productivity and economic gains for companies. But these new technologies also dramatically shif the nature of where data is, how much there is, and how it […]
By now the benefits of cloud computing are well understood. Whether by reducing costs, providing better services, or improving efficiencies, the cloud has transformed business operations in a wide range of industries. What’s not as widely known is how the cloud is disrupting legacy industries previously thought immune to the forces of the cloud. Now industries […]
According to a new study this week, 41 percent of global organizations will increase their IT security budgets in 2014. The increased focus on securing corporate data and devices probably isn’t surprising to most industry onlookers, given the amount of media coverage we’ve seen recently around attacks on enterprises, not to mention Edward Snowden and […]
The enterprise technology landscape has seen tremendous evolution in the past several years as disruptive change has hit almost every corner of the market. Nowhere is this more evident than in the move to cloud computing, where momentum continues to build. Consider: IT Cloud services spending is expected to reach $72.9 billion by 2015 • […]
This excerpt is taken from a post I wrote that was featured yesterday on Boston.com. I discuss legacy technology companies and how they are buying innovation today and in years to come. (L)ess than one in five global companies deems itself “very effective” at breakthrough innovation, according to a Bain Consulting survey. At current scale, it’s difficult for tech giants […]
Ascent portfolio company StartApp has been on an incredible ride over the last 18 months, and recently achieved its biggest milestone yet in its young history: one billion downloads. (As the linked video clip persuasively notes, this is a very big number.) The rapid growth of StartApp speaks to the mobile industry problem it solves. […]
We’ve written frequently about BYOD, the consumerization of IT and their impacts on enterprise technology. As disruptive to the enterprise as BYOD has been, it’s also somewhat become the norm, with reports that as many as 70 percent of employees who own a smartphone or tablet choose to use it to access corporate data, and […]
