REMINDER: Voyager office hours today – 1-3 pm, on the 2nd floor landing!
This is an opportunity to talk with a rep from a local venture capital firm about entrepreneurship or your startup idea, or just to make a connection. Please stop by whether you already have a brilliant start-up idea, or are just curious about entrepreneurship and want to ask basic question!
Voyager Capital is the leading seed and first round technology venture firm in the Pacific Northwest managing $400 million in institutional capital in four funds. With offices in Menlo Park, Portland and Seattle, Voyager’s investment partners begin working with entrepreneurs at the earliest of stages, as their first institutional investor and board member. We strongly prefer to work with co-founding CEO’s who can scale all the way through an exit, whether that be IPO or M&A. Our past 70 investments range from cloud and core technology, to digital media and enterprise SaaS. We initially invest as little as $500k and over time continue to support our largest and most successful investments with as much as $5-7 million of equity capital. Several of the startups we led first round investments for are now at scale and readying for IPOs including Act-On Software (marketing SaaS), ChargePoint (EV charging network software) and Elemental Technologies (software-defined video processing). Our most recent investments include Ayla Networks (IoT platform), Lytics.io (big data), SkyWard.io (aerial robotics software), and Wise.io (machine learning). Over the lifecycle of an investment, Voyager partners with some of the most respected VC’s in Boston and Silicon Valley such as General Catalyst Partners, North Bridge Venture Partners, Norwest Venture Partners and Technology Crossover Ventures.
As a member of Lee Hood’s 100 Person Wellness Project, headquartered in Seattle’s Institute for System Biology, I am engaged in experiments to read out the time varying state of a complex dynamical system – my human body. However, the human body is host to 100 trillion microorganisms, ten times the number of cells in the human body, and these microbes contain 100 times the number of DNA genes that our human DNA does. The microbial component of this “superorganism” is comprised of hundreds of species spread over many taxonomic phyla. The human immune system is tightly coupled with this microbial ecology and in cases of autoimmune disease, both the immune system and the microbial ecology can have dynamic excursions far from normal. To provide a deeper context for the microbiome results from the 100 Person Wellness Project, I have been exploring the variation in the microbiome ecology across healthy and chronically ill populations. Our research starts with trillions of DNA bases, produced by Illumina Next Generation sequencers, of the human gut microbial DNA taken from my own body over time, as well as from hundreds of people sequenced under the NIH Human Microbiome Project. To decode the details of the microbial ecology we feed this data into parallel supercomputers, running sophisticated bioinformatics software pipelines. We then use Calit2/SDSC designed Big Data PCs to manage the data and drive innovative scalable visualization systems to examine the complexities of the changing human gut microbial ecology in health and disease. I will show how advanced data analytics tools find patterns in the resulting microbial distribution data that suggest new hypotheses for clinical application.