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Welcoming our First Dedicated Select/Spring Fund Partner Sri Pangulur

Posted on September 18, 2023September 18, 2023 by Kelsey Reardon

I’m excited to welcome Sri Pangulur, a proven enterprise infrastructure, developer tools, and SaaS investor and operating leader, to the team as our newest and eighth partner. Sri will be our first dedicated partner for Select/Spring Funds. He will be partnering with entrepreneurs focusing on enterprise infrastructure, AI, developer tools, and SaaS. These companies will be primarily at the Series B stage and we will invest in them out of our Select/Spring funds, which represent approximately $800 million of capital. To date, we have invested in 23 companies from our Select Funds across all layers of the technology stack, and announced our new $375M Select III/Spring Fund in May of this year.

Prior to Mayfield, Sri led the enterprise software investing practice at Tribe Capital and was an active angel investor before that. Some entrepreneurs he has partnered with include the teams from Apollo.io, LinearB, Docker, JupiterOne, Orum, Instabase, MindsDB, Abnormal Security, Hasura, HYCU, Nylas, Airbyte, Hightouch, and Oort.

During his operating career, Sri held sales and business development leadership roles across multiple enterprise infrastructure and SaaS companies. Prior to his operating tenure, Sri was a member of the investment banking division of Barclays Capital.

The team at Mayfield is collaborative and focused, where every new member makes a significant impact toward our firm’s success. Sri embodies the Mayfield Way, a set of of operating principles that guide our firm, and is a perfect addition to our team for the following reasons:

The founders he has worked with highlight his empathy for their journey, which is a key pillar of our People-First philosophy;
His unique combination of recent operating and investing experience enables him to bring a both-sides-of-the-table mindset when guiding entrepreneurs;
He complements our inception stage focus with expertise for companies a little further along. Key areas he has contributed to include rounding out executive teams for the next stage of growth, upleveling founder narratives for successful future financings, and leveraging his recent operating experience to build scalable go-to-market strategies, high-performance organization structures and business models;
He is not a fan of the recent *steroid era of investing* and brings a craftsperson approach which is a signature of our firm.

Sri outlines some reasons for his excitement in joining our team including:

Having known us personally and by reputation for a long time as a focused and high-performing team with a track record of success;
Our People-First culture and willingness to follow our own North Star;
The greenfield opportunity to further build our Select/Spring investment practice.

Sri joins us during a momentous year at Mayfield, one during which we raised $955 million in May across our oversubscribed Mayfield XVII and Mayfield Select III/Spring Funds in record time, and also announced our $250 million AI Start Seed Fund in July.

We look forward to partnering with bold entrepreneurs on their inception to iconic journeys.

A People-First View of the AI Economy | TechCrunch

Posted on August 30, 2023August 30, 2023 by Kelsey Reardon

Mayfield Announces $250 Million AI Start Seed Fund and Adds New Partner

Posted on July 20, 2023August 2, 2023 by KBD Admin

Mayfield, a top-tier early-stage venture capital firm, today announced the $250 million AI Start, the first seed fund in its history, to partner with AI-first founders starting at Day Zero. The Firm also added Vijay Reddy, an AI-focused investor with a decade of successful seed stage experience, as a dedicated AI Start Seed Fund partner.

Mayfield Launches New $250 Million AI-Specific Seed Stage Fund

Posted on July 20, 2023August 2, 2023 by KBD Admin

Longtime venture capital firm Mayfield Fund is launching a new investment vehicle specifically to back artificial intelligence startups.

Announcing The $250 Million Mayfield AI Start Seed Fund

Posted on July 20, 2023August 30, 2023 by KBD Admin

Today we are announcing the $250 million Mayfield AI Start, our first seed fund, out of which we will invest in AI-first founders starting at Day Zero.

MindsDB: Introducing the World’s First Cloud to Serve AI Intelligence Logic

Posted on June 1, 2023August 2, 2023 by Kelsey Reardon

Having worked in tech as an entrepreneur and investor for over 25 years, I remember the exuberance of the Web era of the mid to late 90s, which yielded enduring enterprise software companies. The hallmark attributes of many giants were that they had a painkiller value proposition, combined revolutionary approaches that integrated into existing architectures, and enabled enterprises to leverage their current developer resources. Today, we are squarely in the AI-first era, with enterprises rushing to adopt the benefits of AI. With the announcement of our lead investment in MindsDB’s $25 million financing round, I am proud to welcome Jorge, Adam and the MindsDB team to the Mayfield family. I believe that as the industry’s first cloud to serve AI intelligence logic, they will play a role similar to the legendary web application server BEA Systems/Oracle and supercharge enterprise adoption of AI.

To understand the role of an AI intelligence logic cloud, we need to go back in history to look at the idea of a three tier architecture, a well-established software concept that organizes applications into three logical and physical computing tiers: the presentation tier; the application logic tier; and the data tier, where the data associated with the application is stored and managed. During the web era, the presentation tier was dominated by web servers on which websites were built; the middle tier by application logic servers which housed the logic and transaction capability; and the data tier by databases. In today’s AI-first world, there’s a lot of activity on the presentation tier with consumer interfaces powered by multiple AI frameworks; data repositories have grown beyond SQL to include many NoSQL and data lake leaders; but the middle tier of a unified cloud to serve AI intelligence logic is still nascent.

MindsDB, which grew out of an open source project started over five years ago, is growing into the must-have middle tier cloud to serve AI intelligence logic, driven by three attributes:

A framework- and data-agnostic stance (currently supports 10+ front end AI frameworks and 100+ data sources);
The technical breakthrough of adding AI tables to existing databases which enables users to identify patterns, predict trends, and train models;
A data-centric approach that eliminates the need for ETL and minimizes data exposure risks.

As a result, existing developers can grow into an army of AI engineers who quickly deliver production-ready applications, thereby enabling enterprises to generate revenue, but also control costs by leveraging in-house talent.

Building on the momentum of its open-source project, MindsDB has achieved several key milestones:

Adding more than a hundred platform integrations, including with big tech players like OpenAI, Hugging Face, Snowflake, MongoDB, Databricks.
Being recognized as one of Forbes’ Top AI 50 Companies and named as a Cool Vendor in Gartner’s 2022 Data-Centric AI and multiple Hype Cycle reports.
Transforming into a mature open-source project with more than 500 code contributors, 16k+ stars from the community and more than one hundred thousand installations.
Launching a Cloud Enterprise version, proven by tens of thousands of developers.

We believe that MindsDB is well on the evolution path from open source phenomenon to a must have cloud that serves AI intelligence logic to enterprises. This will firmly establish it as a key player in the AI-first landscape, similar to how BEA powered an entire class of web apps. We are excited to partner with the MindsDB team and investors and look forward to their journey from inception to an iconic company.

Category: News