Sinewave Ventures

Sitting between Silicon Valley and the federal government is how SineWave Ventures places itself. The San Francisco firm is an early-stage venture capital investor in enterprise technology, and it says it wants to help entrepreneurs speed up digital transformation across business and government buyers alike, in the Valley and elsewhere. Its partners also talk publicly about helping start-ups reach the public sector market, and the firm publishes a blog on topics such as selling to the US federal market.

Four themes it invests in

The firm groups its interest into four short goals: abstracting away the complexity that stops data being used well, lowering the barrier to analytics and data processing, using machines to make work and life easier for people, and easing navigation of distributed data environments. These map to four areas on its site: data and analytics, networking, cybersecurity and computing.

Computing within reach

SineWave describes a belief in the democratization of big compute, the idea that high performance computing is no longer only for data centers and scientists. It looks for technologies that run high performance workloads on commodity hardware, support distributed and edge computing and stream processing, and make use of specialized processors. Because demand for compute rises and falls, it also favors tools that provision and configure resources quickly.

Data that non-specialists can use

The firm treats data as the driving force of business and says the ability to use it in decisions will separate winners from losers. It looks for data ingest technologies, developer tooling for AI and machine learning, understandable AI systems, analytic workflow tools, analytics that control automated processes, and decision analytics. It is also interested in analytic approaches that adapt to processing limits and latency, including just-in-time, good-enough strategies.

Cybersecurity as part of system management

SineWave argues that talk about cybersecurity has encouraged piles of point solutions and after-the-fact orchestration. It prefers to see security as one dimension of smart system management: knowing your assets and their behavior, spotting deviations from the norm whatever the cause, applying fine-grained controls, and checking that software behaves correctly. Its interests include endpoint security, zero-trust systems, access control and isolation, application security, code analysis and software-defined perimeters, along with new ways to protect data at rest and in motion.

Adaptive networks

Finally, the firm believes a data-driven world needs networks that can change with how operations are distributed. It looks at software-defined networking, edge networks and 5G, backed by policy-driven networking and secure configuration.

SineWave Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in enterprise technology. It sits between the technology industry and government, and it helps start-ups that want to sell to public sector customers. The firm is based in San Francisco.

What SineWave Ventures offers

• Data and analytics: backing companies that make complex data easier to use and analyse.
• Networking: investment in firms working on distributed and connected data environments.
• Cybersecurity: funding for security start-ups.
• Computing: investment in machine-driven tools meant to ease work and daily life.
• Public sector guidance: its partners advise start-ups on entering the government market.

Clients

The firm backs entrepreneurs building technology for commercial and public sector customers, both inside and outside Silicon Valley.

Key facts

• Based in: San Francisco, California
• Stage: early-stage venture capital
• Content: publishes a blog, and its partners appear on cybersecurity podcasts