Rebecca McDougal, VP Client Success at Synapse, has been passionate about customer service and support since the day she entered the workforce. Today, she uses that enthusiasm to help Synapse clients automate and streamline their instructional design process ensuring they have the support they need to implement and leverage their solution!

Ok, I’m not advocating for you to spend the next 24 months taking the CPA exam and then punch the clock for 90 hours a week at PWC for another 3-5 years to become good at sales. However, I am suggesting that you should be able to hold your own in the conference room when the accounting lingo starts getting thrown around.

There exists a vibrant ecosystem of specialized security tools. The sad truth is that it is almost impossible to reach 100% invulnerability.

DevOps continues to get a lot of attention as a wave of companies develop more sophisticated tools to help developers manage increasingly complex architectures and workloads. In the latest development, Databand — an AI-based observability platform for data pipelines, specifically to detect when something is going wrong with a datasource when an engineer is using a disparate set of data management tools — has closed a round of $14.5 million.

Consumer intelligence startup Konnecto is putting $3.5 million of seed funding to work to provide brands with data and insights on their customers.

When done properly, channel sales can be a very valuable asset for your company. It can afford you instant credibility with customers and leverage for your sales, implementation, and customer support teams with minimal increases to headcount. Just be sure you are acutely aware of the risks and over-prepare for the inevitable challenges that will arise.

Figuring out how to sell your product in the earliest days of a startup is one of the biggest challenges founders face. While it sounds appealing, the strategy to sell through partners and relying on product-led sales at the Seed stage of a company always make me highly uncomfortable. Increasingly it seems many founders casually toss around the statement “we are going to take a bottoms-up strategy, like Slack, to bring our product to market” or “we have a partnership with [insert giant tech/consulting firm] that is going to sell our product to their [insert absurd number of customers].” This is fine as a vision but, in the beginning, the only way to get your product into the hands of customers is through founder sales.

The following dichotomy complicates the decision on whether or not to invest in quantum computing: quantum computing will revolutionize the landscape of high-powered computing in every industry that depends on number-crunching; quantum computing hardware is years away from being broadly available and affordable. Quantum computers are inevitable, and their game-changing nature makes it imperative that businesses invest in developing in-house expertise. When quantum computers become as ubiquitous as classical computers* are today, any company that doesn’t have a grasp on how quantum computing will revolutionize their industry’s use of software will be left in the dust by those that do.

Knockri, a leading developer of artificial intelligence video-based soft-skill assessment and talent mobility solutions, today announced it has closed an oversubscribed seed round of $3 Million led by Differential Ventures with participation from Grand Ventures, MaRS IAF, BDMI – Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Amplify Capital and others to transform talent acquisition and increase diverse hiring.

Good research requires well-tested software that validates the accuracy of the research results. Good products require a much higher level of testing, that not only ensures the accuracy of software, but also ensures maximum uptime, eliminates failures, maintains efficiency and performance, and protects customers from experiencing any negative impact from software changes

Our data is everywhere. We can’t stop companies from having it. But we have a right to know how it is used. By encrypting all human behavioral data and creating an audit trail when it is decrypted and used, we can achieve enforceable data privacy policies.

Nick Adams is a co-founder and managing partner of Differential Ventures and an investor on ZeeTV's startup fundraising show 'Break Through the Crowd.'

Previously, Nick was a Venture Partner at Supernode.vc, f.k.a. Flatiron Investors, in New York City where he evaluated seed- stage SaaS companies and led the due diligence for multiple investments. Before moving into Venture Capital, Nick held senior sales, marketing and product management roles for software companies that have realized over $1.3 billion in exit value, including: Opower (IPO), RAGE Frameworks (acquired by Genpact), Basware (Publicly-traded on OMX), and Comverge (acquired by Itron).

He mentors startups, helps with non-profit ventures and is a former baseball player who always keeps his eye on the ball. Listen in as Nick connects with Lou Diamond on Thrive LOUD

Since the outbreak of Covid-19 shuttered the US economy in March the investor community has been spewing advice to startups at a rapid pace. One of the refrains sung most frequently is ‘cut your burn rate to extend runway as long as possible.’ While this advice certainly seems to have merit, we set out to evaluate the available data from 2008 to better understand why.

'Leadership Series' Part 3 - ZOOM Fatigue is Real

Like many of us, I have been spending weeks on end in my home office in front of my computer screen. And at the end of each week, I have been bleary eyed and utterly exhausted. Wanting to better understand why I was so tired, I logged onto my Zoom account to see how much time I had spent ‘connecting’ to clients and colleagues during the week. Whether conducting group sessions, working one-on-one, facilitating a large group presentation or participating in a virtual happy hour, I spent over 45 HOURS IN ZOOM MEETINGS in one week alone. I’m ‘ZOOMED OUT’.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Differential Ventures decided to give away up to $500,000 in $25,000 grants to early-stage data science-oriented startups pivoting to adapt their technology to help cure the disease or help society recover from it. One of the most common questions we received was: Why? The answer has to do with our understanding of the value of data science, the nature of early-stage investing, and the desire to help lead our industry, early-stage investing, through this crisis intact.

The COVID-19 health and economic crisis is in Month Two for most of North America and if one thing remains certain it’s that everything remains quite uncertain. Hopefully, by now you have gone through a couple of iterations of scenario planning for your business and have identified various approaches to keeping the lights on. The next question to ask yourself each morning, after ‘how do we keep the lights on?,’ should be ‘what do I want my company to be after we get through this crisis?’

On March 29th, our team announced a $500,000 pool of funds to be awarded in $10,000 - $25,000 grants to startups that are using data science, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to find solutions for the myriad challenges created by COVID-19. Today we are thrilled to announce the second batch of awards to seven companies that have taken a leadership role in this fight.

Similar to the recent years leading up to the sudden outbreak of COVID-19, VC investment increased rapidly from the Dotcom crash of the early 2000’s to the GFC. Between 2003 to 2008, total VC investment increased from $8.3 billion to $21 billion only to be cut in half to $10.3 billion just two years later. As you can see in the chart below, VC investment came roaring back hitting 2x its pre-GFC peak and 4x the trough by 2018.

Just about a week ago we announced that over 50 countries are coming together to support inventors, innovators, developers and anyone with a passion to tackle COVID-19 in their country. Today, we are proud to announce that our commitment to those innovators will live beyond Startup Weekend. The top teams will go on to receive training and financial support.

I have spent most of my career running trading, capital markets, and investment businesses. I was a trader during the Asian Financial Crisis, Russian Financial Crisis, the Dot-Com blow up, ran a credit derivative business during the Financial Crisis, and am currently a director of a public company that is managing through the current COVID crisis. So I have learned much from managing risk during turbulent times (having paid a reasonable tuition to acquire such knowledge!). Rather than relay personal anecdotes, I thought I’d summarize some key takeaways.

Cyolo Raises $4.2 Million to provide boundless secure business connectivity. Cyolo securely connects onsite and remote users, to the organization's applications, servers, desktops and files, in any network or in the cloud

Concertio, the leading provider of AI-powered performance optimization software, today announced the closing of its $4.2M Seed Round, led by Differential Ventures. The funds will be used to scale operations of its AIOps Optimizer platform and to further the company’s technology lead in dynamic, continuous, and static optimization.

It was late September 2001, just after the 9/11 attacks which I had witnessed from the Naval Explosive Ordnance Disposal Unit in Newport Rhode Island where I was on reserve duty. As the Executive Officer of the associated Navy Reserve Dive Unit, I had spent that infamous day trying to figure out how to get my unit to New York City to assist. But today, three weeks later, I was back on campus at my alma mater, Stanford, for my 5-year college reunion. It was not only post-9/11, but it was post the Dotcom crash. What was particularly memorable about the reunion is that most of us were not working.

Some of the most impactful relationships are formed between entrepreneurs who can help one another avoid missteps and identify blindspots without the pressures associated with investor relationship or personal ties. For this reason, we have partnered with fellow VCs to launch the private network of startup founders called 'Off the Record’.

In case you haven’t noticed, the news hasn’t been particularly positive over the last couple of weeks. It is impossible to miss the barrage of demoralizing headlines: Cash is king. Layoffs. Fundraising is going to be hard. Budgets are on hold. These are all likely realities for the foreseeable future so, do manage costs tightly, as difficult as it may be. However, don’t give up on sales and growth just yet!

So, why is investing in cybersecurity any harder than, say, investing in machine learning technology or data engineering technology? I would boil the answer down to three core reasons: cybersecurity is adversarial in nature; the founders are necessarily opaque about their solutions, and the solutions tend to be inefficiently siloed.

Venture capital in New York is at record levels as is the the number of startups seeking it. How has the fundraising environment changed over the last decade and where should founders go to find seed capital?

Between ELIZA and Alexa, there have been countless attempts at passing the Turing Test. Today, AI is promising to produce an unsupervised human-level performance on a variety of tasks: self-driving cars, intelligent digital assistants, automated customer service representatives, and more. But one thing they promise which I am sure they will never achieve is something that AI is incapable of doing: understanding.

Fundraising woes can probably fill several therapy sessions so, for today, I am going to focus on one, particularly nuanced, challenge. We often hear that one of the most agonizing tasks for founders who are looking to raise angel, pre-seed and seed capital is how to present financials in your fundraising presentation when most of the numbers are just that: projections.

Data-driven models are highly dependent on the quality of the training data, as well as on the consistency of the data given to them in deployment. If the training data or the real-world test data changes in some material way, data scientists need to have the tools to detect those changes as soon as they might begin impacting the performance of those applications, or even before.

If companies are depending on data-driven systems for mission-critical components of their business, or if those systems are critical for the profitability of the company, managers will be far more comfortable predicting future behavior if they understand, or can explain, what information is driving the systems and contributing the most to their behavior.

All the financial projections in the world won’t save you if you can’t identify and execute on the tactical actions to build a sales funnel. Here are the 4 metrics we advise founders to focus on to build early traction.

As AI replaces human supervision of machines, regulatory bodies are enacting rules that govern how those computer systems can operate. In particular, rules to prevent prohibited forms of bias in AI systems. We discuss how model monitoring works for regulatory bias.

Some of the most impactful relationships are formed between entrepreneurs who can help one another avoid missteps and identify blindspots without the pressures associated with investor relationship or personal ties. For this reason, we have partnered with fellow VCs to launch the private network of startup founders called 'Off the Record’.

Differential partner, David Magerman, talks AI, data privacy and VC investing with John Siracusa.

Ocrolus, a New York startup that taps AI and machine learning to parse financial documents, today announced it has raised $24 million in a series B round led by venture growth equity firm Oak HC/FT.

Ocrolus, a New York startup that taps AI and machine learning to parse financial documents, today announced it has raised $24 million in a series B round led by venture growth equity firm Oak HC/FT.

Synapse, a provider of technology for the Learning and Development market announced today that it closed a US$2.5 million seed financing to fuel growth of its Learning Design System.

Ocrolus, the emerging leader in analyzing financial documents, today at the LendIt Fintech USA Conference, announced a $4 million Series A investment led by Bullpen Capital with participation from QED Investors, Laconia Capital Group, ValueStream Ventures, and RiverPark Ventures.

In the hedge fund world and in the drama surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s harvesting of personal data, as well as Facebook’s year-long fall from grace, there have been few voices of conscience. David Magerman is one of them.

NEW YORK, Nov. 29, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Seed- and early-stage venture capital firm Differential Ventures recently announced the addition of David Magerman, former research scientist and head of production at hedge fund management firm Renaissance Technologies, as managing partner. Magerman joins current managing partners Nick Adams and Alex Katz.

David Magerman, who left Renaissance Technologies last year in a dispute with Robert Mercer over politics, is turning his talents from trading to venture capital. He joined Differential Venture Partners as a managing partner this month.

Magerman said the purpose of his group is educational, to promote understanding of Facebook. “If people want to be enslaved by technology because they get benefit out of it they can make that choice,” he said. “As an informed choice.”

Ocrolus is a RegTech Company that uses Artificial Intelligence to automate underwriting tasks with unprecedented accuracy and confidence. The technology parses financial documents, principally bank statements, with a combination of pattern recognition, crowdsourced data verification and fraud detection. With stunning efficiency, Ocrolus delivers standardized, actionable data that is inputted directly into credit models without the need for human intervention. Ocrolus is a unique solution for transparent analysis and rigorous documentation in credit decisioning.

On Sunday, October 14, media and entertainment mega-giant ZEE Entertainment debuted the first episode of Break Through The Crowd – a new series that will give a handful of lucky contestants a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to turn their entrepreneurial dreams into a reality by pitching their ideas to some of the sharpest minds in business.

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