LDV Community is Helping Each Other Succeed: November 2022 Happy Hour Photos
/We’ve just announced our 10th LDV anniversary! Wow – it’s been a decade since Evan Nisselson founded LDV Capital in 2012 with a unique thesis of investing in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. Since the majority of data that human brains analyze is visual, therefore visual data is critical to the success of artificial intelligence across all businesses. We are still the only venture fund with this thesis.
We host our LDV Community Dinners & Happy Hours to bring together our tight-knit LDV community – the world’s brightest technology innovators, serial entrepreneurs, deep tech researchers and investors – to discuss cutting-edge visual tech. After two years of virtual events, we are excited to be hosting a range of invite-only LDV Community events in person.
(L-R) Evan Nisselson, Founder & General Partner at LDV Capital, and Jonathan Zobel, managing director in RBC Capital Markets’ financial-institutions group, with a focus on insurance. Jonathan has more than 20 years of banking experience, and most recently was a managing director of CITI’s Financial Institutions Group. He covered clients in the insurance sector including Fortitude Re, Hartford Financial Services Group Inc., Pacific Life Insurance Co. and Sammons Financial Group Inc.
Check out other photographs from our fourth and final 2022 “Happy Hour” event hosted in New York City. The photographs are by Robert Wright.
(L-R) Joshua Auerbach, Chief Operating Officer at Aura, is speaking with Rob Platzer, CTO at Syndio, where he is building a platform that strengthens workplaces and supports more affective teams by bringing attention to the individual.
Aura is a new kind of connected photo frame, powered by an invite-only group of friends and family. Prior to that, Joshua was a partner and CFO at Betaworks Studio. He co-led Hacker in Residence program to create new startups in the studio.
Rob is a 20-year tech industry veteran experienced in building innovative data centric applications at web scale. Most recently, he was CTO of Bitly and AOL’s Patch.
(L-R) Mimi Ghosh is chatting with Kat Kolambet Lopez, LDV’s Director of Content & Marketing, and Ash Cleary, Analyst at LDV Capital. Mimi is a Financial Sponsors Coverage at Bank of America. Prior to that Mimi was a banker with J.P. Morgan serving high-growth companies and investors within the technology and consumer sectors, and a middle market investment banker for Raymond James covering the tech services and consumer sectors.
(L-R) Nicolas Heron, Senior Manager of Applied Science - Softlines Fashion Tech Initiatives at Amazon, previously the VP Engineering at Body Labs, is speaking with Eric Rachlin, founder of a stealth startup, previously the cofounder and CTO of Body Labs, Brian Derickson, Analyst at LDV Capital, and William O'Farrell, Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School, Co-Founder, CEO & Chairman of Body Labs (the company was acquired by Amazon in 2017).
Brian Rifkin, Co-Founder and SVP of Strategic Partnerships at JW Player, the most powerful & flexible video platform powered by the fastest, most-used HTML5 online video player. Prior to that he founded “A Simple Internet”, a New York-based media services firm that specializes in performance-based marketing and media strategy.
(L-R) Jonathan Zobel, managing director in RBC Capital Markets’ financial-institutions group, with a focus on insurance, is speaking with Tsafrir Oranski, Vice President Of Business Development at Parametrix Insurance, and Chris Phare, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Voyant Photonics.
Carlos Bhola, Managing Director at Celsius Capital, an investment and advisory services firm focused on companies in the technology, media and telecommunications (TMT) sectors.
Portfolio companies include: EachNet (acquired by eBay); Vonage (NYSE IPO, where Carlos was co-Founder and President); gate5 (acquired by Nokia); Zenbe (acquired by Facebook); SmartPay/Jieyin (acquired by Ping An); and kikin (where Carlos was co-Founder and CEO). With Audi, BMW and Daimler, Celsius acquired HERE from Nokia.
(L-R) Peter Stern, CEO at Voyant Photonics, and Steven Miller, Voyant Photonics, Co-Founder & CTO. Voyant Photonics is an LDV portfolio company that has developed a revolutionary small LiDAR on a chip. Peter is a serial entrepreneur who built and sold Datek Online to Ameritrade for $1.6B and built/sold Zenbe to Facebook.
Voyant’s co-founders Dr. Steven Miller and Dr. Chris Phare worked closely with leading silicon photonics expert Dr. Michal Lipson at her renowned Lipson Nanophotonics Group at Columbia University.
Eric Rachlin is currently working on a new startup built on top of emerging techniques for using natural language to tell computers what to do. Previously, he was the cofounder and CTO of Body Labs, a computer vision startup (acq. by Amazon in 2017) focused on predicting an individuals shape and movement from images, videos or a wide variety of 3D data. Within Amazon, he became head of Body Labs in 2019 and helped integrate Body Labs tech into several flagship Amazon product launches.
(L-R) Rob Platzer is speaking with Emily Bosworth, Business Development Associate at Gameto, and Agustina Figueroa Imfeld, Legal Associate at Gameto. Gameto is a biotechnology company using cell engineering to develop therapeutics for diseases of the female reproductive system. Their first program, Fertilo, is a therapeutic for IVF and egg freezing, aiming to make the process shorter, safer and more effective. Read more in our interview with Martin Varsavsky, Founder and Chairman of Gameto.
(L-R) Steve Raizes, executive VP of podcasting and audio at Paramount, is speaking with Evan Nisselson. Steve heads all audio initiatives for CBS News, in addition to continuing leading Paramount’s centralized podcasting group. Prior to that Raizes served as senior VP, podcasts and live, at Viacom. In that role, he launched more than 35 new properties and was one of the key architects behind Comedy Central’s Clusterfest, a three-day immersive music festival. Before that, Raizes spent nearly 13 years at Comedy Central.
(L-R) Kat Kolambet-Lopez, Director of Content & Marketing at LDV Capital, speaking with Stella Kim and Mimi Ghosh. Stella is a founder of a new femtech startup that is currently in stealth, she is also a founder of Mixlab, the pet pharmacy humans are jealous of.
Hilary Howe, Director of Growth at Seedcamp. She supports Seedcamp companies at pre-seed or seed as they breakout from Series A and beyond. Prior to that, she was Chief Investment Officer at Newlab.
Joshua Auerbach, Chief Operating Officer at Aura, a new kind of connected photo frame, powered by an invite-only group of friends and family. Prior to that, he was a partner and CFO at Betaworks Studio.
Emi Gal, Co-founder & CEO at Ezra, a startup transforming early cancer screening using full-body MRI scans. Previously, Emi co-founded Brainient, a startup increasing the engagement and performance of online video adverts by making them more personalized and interactive. Branient was acquired by Teads.
(L-R) Helen Zelman Boniske, Partner at Lemnos – Hardware Venture Fund, is speaking with Chris Brown, Inception Program Partner Manager at NVIDIA, and Alexis Tryon, founder and principal at Extra Yarn, a growth & strategy consulting firm. Alex is currently exploring ideas for her next company.
Helen Zelman Boniske, Partner at Lemnos. Lemnos thrives in the earliest stages of building hardware, when every dollar counts, every hour matters, and each decision is crucial to success or failure. They help hardware founders better understand their customer, anticipate problems, and leverage their assets.
November is Lung Cancer Awareness Month. Early detection is cancer’s greatest weakness. For attendees of our Happy Hour event and for you reading this post, we are happy to share the promo code that grants $150 OFF your Ezra scan: LDV150. Book your scan in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Miami, or Las Vegas.
(L-R) Tsafrir Oranski, Vice President Of Business Development at Parametrix Insurance, is chatting with Chris Phare, Co-Founder and Chief Science Officer at Voyant Photonics, and Mimi Ghosh, responsible for Financial Sponsors Coverage at Bank of America.
Joshua Brustein, a senior editor at Bloomberg News, and the technology editor at Businessweek magazine. Joshua moderated a panel discussion “How Will Autonomous Vehicles Impact Society?” with Taggart Matthiesen, VP of Product at Lyft, and K. Charles Janac, President & CEO at Arteris at our 4th Annual LDV Vision Summit.
(L-R) Amanda Zamurs, Director of Marketing & Partnerships at Nace Partners – a technical recruiting firm, is speaking with Michael Moretti, Market Manager at Silicon Valley Bank. Prior to joining SVB in 2003, Michael founded fintech startup LConnect Inc. and was in the international, corporate and investment banking markets since 1982.
Alexis Tryon, founder and principal at Extra Yarn, a growth & strategy consulting firm. She is currently exploring ideas for her next company and spending time with early-stage founders who are building world-changing ideas.
