Yesterday I had a conversation about the most influential female venture capitalists, and one name that popped up was Ann Miura-Ko. She’s a co-founding partner of Floodgate (fka Maples Investments), while not working on a Ph.D in mathematics over at Stanford. My gut take was that she probably will deserve to be part of the conversation in a couple of years — I’m intrigued by some of her portfolio companies, like ModCloth — but not quite yet.
Anyway, I bring it up this morning because Miura-Ko’s name pops up in a Form D filing for a Palo Alto startup called Ayasdi. Seems the company has secured $1.53 million of a $2 million offering (unclear if that $2 million is an active target, total unfunded commitment or “big” number that helps preclude the need for an amended filing).
There isn’t too much public info yet on Ayasdi (not even a CrunchBase profile), and its website simply says the following:
Ayasdi is a well funded, early stage, exploratory analytics startup founded by entrepreneurs from Stanford and Oracle.
We’ve already discussed the “well-funded” part, so here are the other slivers of info I’ve found around the Intertubes:
- The company’s CEO is Gurjeet Singh, a former research scientist at Stanford. His interests included machine learning, topological data analysis, statistics and visualization for large data.
- The company’s other co-founder is Harlan Sexton, a former Oracle engineer who also spent a long time doing math at Stanford.
- Also involved as president and CFO is Gunnar Carlsson, a math professor at Stanford.
- Notice a trend here? Basically everyone at the company — including Ann Miura-Ko and some lower-level engineers — have a strong connection to the Stanford math department. Makes me wonder if this is some sort of commercialization spinout.
- Note: I’m making an assumption in the headline that Floodgate has backed Ayasdi, via Miura-Ko’s involvement as the company’s only listed director outside of Singh. It is possible — albeit highly unlikely — that she’s serving as an independent director without having invested any Floodgate capital. I’ve emailed Maples for confirmation, and will update if/when I get it. [Update: Got confirm from another source]
Ayasdi’s mission is to “map and explore worlds of data.” More specifically, its LinkedIn profile says it plans to “specialize in analysis and visualization of large structured (microarrays, proteomics, seismology) and unstructured datasets (graphs, networks, text).”
Here is more from a YouTube video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FIKBWLH6vas]