Sapphire Ventures Promotes Four Investment Professionals

PALO ALTO, Calif., Jan. 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Off the heels of a successful year, Sapphire Ventures is pleased to announce the promotion of Anders Ranum, Kevin Diestel and Rajeev Dham to partner, and Winter Mead to principal. The promotions recognize each individual's contribution to Sapphire Ventures' recent achievements and reinforce the firm's commitment to strengthening its investment team to continue supporting category-leading technology companies.

"I am thrilled to announce the promotions of Anders, Kevin, Rajeev and Winter, who played an integral role in Sapphire Ventures' 35-plus investments and five exits this past year," said Nino Marakovic, CEO and managing director. "Each has worked tirelessly to support the growth of our portfolio and fund investments, and I look forward to watching them continue to lead in 2018 and help us further invest Fund III."

Anders, who joined the firm in 2012, focuses on investing in high-growth SaaS, infrastructure and cybersecurity companies. Most recently, he led the firm's investments in fraud prevention platform Feedzai, cloud platform Fastly and mobile engagement platform FollowAnalytics. He also led Sapphire's investments in Gild (acquired by Citadel), ScaleIO, Iron.io and DSSD (acquired by EMC). Anders sits on the boards of Feedzai, FollowAnalytics and Portworx, and he also supports JFrog, Looker, Narrative Science, OpsRamp and Sumo Logic. When he's not investing, Anders moonlights as a product manager supporting his portfolio companies.

Kevin, who also joined the firm in 2012, helped launch Sapphire's consumer practice, which invests in high-growth consumer technology companies. He led the firm's investments in consumer genetics company 23andMe, employee engagement and analytics platform Culture Amp and healthy meal kit delivery service Sun Basket. He also works with Convercent, Fitbit, IEX, Integral Ad Science, Jibe, Kaltura and Socrata. When asked about his favorite part of investing, Kevin mentions working with some of the smartest entrepreneurs in the world who are doing incredible things on a daily basis."

Rajeev, who joined the firm in 2013, helps lead Sapphire's core technology investment strategy in high-growth digital SaaS, financial technology and digital health businesses. Most recently, he led the firm's investments in TransferWise, a peer-to-peer money transfer service, and Catchpoint, a digital monitoring platform. In addition, Rajeev helped lead the firm's investments in Krux (acquired by Salesforce), Nutanix (NYSE: NTNX), Square (NYSE: SQ) and PubNub. He also works with CloudHealth, LeanData, Livongo, Localytics, Looker and Reltio. When Rajeev isn't advocating for his companies, he's geeking out on SaaS business models. But he most enjoys the camaraderie that is built within companies as a result of the arduous, yet rewarding journey of growing a business.

Winter, who joined Sapphire in 2014, helps lead the firm's fund investing business, which invests in early-stage venture capital funds across enterprise, consumer and healthcare technologies globally. In 2017, Winter helped lead Sapphire's 12 fund commitments and collaborated with the firm's general partners (GPs) to facilitate direct growth-stage investments in several companies, including Fastly, Sun Basket, TransferWise and Wandera. Moreover, Winter has been instrumental in mapping and building out the infrastructure, diligence and benchmarking processes behind the fund investing business. When he's not investing, Winter can be found cooking up his next batch of maple syrup.

2017 was another record year for the firm, which made 37 investments in technology companies and technology-focused venture funds. The firm saw five exits from Alteryx (NYSE: AYX), BlackDuck (acquired by Synopsys), Cyphort (acquired by Juniper Networks), Lithium (acquired by Vista Equity Partners) and MuleSoft (NYSE: MULE), bringing its total to 48 since 2011. In addition, Sapphire's market development team hosted 10 industry events, including its annual CIO Summit, which brought together 100-plus global 2000 CIOs, startups and VCs. It also added new heads of talent and marketing. 

To learn more about Sapphire Ventures, please visit www.sapphireventures.com.

About Sapphire Ventures
Sapphire Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on helping innovative technology companies become global category leaders. Leveraging nearly two decades of experience and an extensive global enterprise network, Sapphire Ventures invests capital, resources and expertise to enable its portfolio companies to scale rapidly. Whether entrepreneurs sell to businesses, consumers or both, Sapphire Ventures offers a powerful platform for business development and operational excellence to help them accelerate growth. With over $2.5 billion under management via direct growth investments and early-stage fund investments, Sapphire Ventures is positioned to elevate companies to the global stage.

Disclosures:

Nothing presented herein is intended to constitute investment advice and under no circumstances should any information provided herein be used or considered as an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy an interest in any investment fund managed by Sapphire Ventures. Sapphire Ventures does not solicit or make its services available to the public and none of the funds are currently open to new investors.

The investments identified above do not necessarily represent all of the investments made or recommended by Sapphire Ventures, and were not selected based on the return on Sapphire Ventures' investment in them. It should not be assumed that any current or future investments were or will be profitable. Past performance is not indicative of future performance.

Contact:
Stefanie Gordish
VP, Marketing
(415) 590-9722
[email protected]

SOURCE Sapphire Ventures

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