Baris Aksoy joins AV8 Ventures today as its newest general partner.
A venture firm backed by insurance giant Allianz is getting a boost from one of Silicon Valley’s biggest names.
Eighteen-month-old firm AV8 Ventures announced on Wednesday it’s hired Google Cloud executive Baris Aksoy as a general partner. Aksoy joins managing partners George Ugras and Miles Kirby in the leadership of the $170 million fund, which focuses on early-stage investments in machine learning, artificial intelligence, healthcare and mobility.
Aksoy joins from Google Cloud, where he ran the media and entertainment vertical, helping broadcasters conduct their business operations without legacy servers. He’d previously founded a data visualization startup that ultimately went belly up, invested in startups personally and then joined video streaming startup Avanto as chief financial officer. Aksoy ended up at Google when the tech giant acquired Avanto in 2016.
The cloud exec isn’t new to venture capital. Earlier in his career, he was an investor at Intel Capital, the venture arm of chipmaker Intel, leading several successful exits. But unlike some investors who look to work their way up the ranks within one shop, Aksoy says he was eager to start again at the bottom as an entrepreneur. “Unless you really understand the pains of the founder, it's really hard to add value [as an investor], so I took almost a 5-year break from venture capital,” he says.
That corporate investor to founder and big-tech exec journey made Aksoy attractive to AV8 Ventures, which says it operates independently but counts German asset management and insurance giant Allianz as its sole limited partner. To Ugras, Aksoy brings a founder-empathetic approach that contrasts with a sea of “transactional” investors in the market. “This business was started in the 1960s and it was really about company-building,” he says — something AV8 believes is lost in the age of the unicorn.
Aksoy says he plans to invest in startups that help companies manage their data in the wake of new privacy regulations in Europe and California, integrate cloud software with existing on-premise systems and protect digital assets against cyber threats.
He joins a firm that while young — its fund only formally closed in April — has made seven investments to date, including home healthcare workflow platform Swift Shift and Contract Wrangler, which is applying machine learning to contracts, as well as startups in healthcare, weather and autonomous trucking. Ugras says the firm hopes to see Aksoy continue its efforts in finding real use cases for the buzzy machine learning category, one he says hasn’t fulfilled its heady promise so far.
While AV8 is far from the only cloud-focused or corporate-backed VC firm, Aksoy and his colleagues hope their approach will stand out against a Silicon Valley culture currently obsessed with success and victory laps. “I hear some investors talking about their investments and bets,” says Aksoy. “We are not that.”
