Announcing a Sponsorship of Colorintech
McKinsey’s Diversity wins: How inclusion matters report, released in May 2020, reinforces that a commitment to diversity is a winning strategy. The firm’s study of ethnic and cultural diversity in 2019 demonstrates that “top quartile companies outperformed those in the fourth one by 36 percent in profitability.” While the stats confirm the financial imperative and innovation gains of diversity, […]
Celebrating the inaugural SaaS Launch Lab cohort
Back in June, in partnership with Davis Wright Tremaine’s Project W, we opened applications for SaaS Launch Lab — a program for promising pre-seed, female-led companies developing enterprise SaaS solutions. The five-week program of virtual workshops is designed to help female founders refine their proof of concept, find the right product-market fit, build a team, […]
Welcoming Pachyderm to the M12 portfolio
We’re excited to welcome Pachyderm — a data science platform that combines Data Lineage with End-to-End Pipelines on Kubernetes — to the M12 portfolio. Despite the growing number of applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence, the tool sets used to execute data science projects largely have not kept pace. Machine learning workflows are time-intensive […]
Co-leading Syntiant’s Series C
I’d like to congratulate Syntiant on raising a successful Series C round, and on surpassing the major milestone of 1 million units shipped. At M12, we’re incredibly proud to support the growth stage of this AI chip company, and to see their customer production volumes ramping. In the words of Professor Andrew Ng, “AI is the new electricity.” […]
Direct Line with Jason Warner, GitHub CTO
Direct Line is a series of interviews with Microsoft execs with an eye toward the startup and VC ecosystem. Our inaugural Q&A session is with Jason Warner, the Chief Technology Officer of GitHub. Jason filled us in on the software development trends that have his attention, and the framework that he uses to consider if the team […]
Announcing our Female Founders Competition winners
Last fall, in partnership with Mayfield and Melinda Gates’s Pivotal Ventures, we launched the second Female Founders Competition to award $6M to four women-led companies building enterprise software and deeptech solutions. While the data has been refreshed with a new calendar year, all-female founding teams earned just 2.8% of venture capital invested in the US in 2019. With more […]
Committing to Included VC
Today, we are thrilled to join the consortium of VCs — including Creandum, Daphni, Enern, K Fund, Mangrove Capital, Notion Capital, Seedcamp, Santander Innoventures, and WSGR — supporting Included VC, a global initiative working to realize greater diversity in the venture capital ecosystem. Included VC is on a mission to change the face of the VC […]
Welcoming Hunters to the M12 Portfolio
I am very excited to welcome Hunters to the M12 portfolio today as a co-lead for their Series A round. I have invested in several cyber companies while at M12 that were early in their startup journey, including Aqua Security and WhiteSource. I am constantly on the lookout for talented teams aiming to solve big problems, thoughtfully leading with intelligence […]
Announcing SaaS Launch Lab with Project W to support pre-seed female founders
Project W burst onto M12’s radar last year when they co-hosted a “friendly feedback” Dolphin Tank pitch session for female founders near our Seattle office. An initiative of Davis Wright Tremaine, Project W is on a mission to help female founders build great companies and to help women take their place in the C-suite and the boardroom. […]
Announcing a sponsorship of Black & Brown Founders
M12 and Microsoft for Startups are proud to sign on as the Diamond Corporate Sponsor of Black & Brown Founders, a nonprofit organization providing Black and Latinx entrepreneurs with best practices and a community through which to build and successfully launch their tech companies. This marks the third year that Microsoft has signed on to support this organization. As a result of […]
