From Academia to Solving Critical Data Challenges for the Fortune 500
Dell Technologies Capital
Leading early-stage investments in foundational enterprise technology companies.
In a world where data integrity will define AI success, we talked to two CEOs who made the move from academia to entrepreneurship to solve data challenges they knew were coming to the enterprise.
SuperAnnotate CEO Vahan Petrosyan talked to us about what’s next for the company after rounding out its $50M Series B with an investment from DTC. Then, we caught up with lakeFS CEO Dr. Einat Orr on the heels of their $20M raise about why git-for-data is more important than ever.
🎩First up, headed to Black Hat? Catch a whole bunch of DTC cybersecurity portfolio companies in person at the event. See where you want to be next week to see top security innovators. And/or, join DTC and SVB for a round of Topgolf.
The New Refinery for AI Data
Enterprises aren’t struggling to gather data. Most have digital wells pumping out petabytes of the value-rich material every day. The challenge is how it’s refined and managed for building tomorrow’s AI tech stack.
And it’s the problem SuperAnnotate is solving. Blending human domain expertise with machine-level speed and accuracy, the company helps Hinge Health, Flo Health, customers of NVIDIA and Databrick, and others build confidence in AI training data – and more confidently scale new AI use cases.
“AI data is only becoming more complex to manage,” CEO @Vahan Petrosyan told us. “We’re helping them centralize all their AI data operations with our ‘operating system’ that labels the data and connects it with models, and creates a more continuous workflow to do evaluation and observability, and do monitoring of those models.”
Vahan shared more about how he and his brother, @Tigran, turned Vahan’s PhD research into a promising startup, and how SuperAnnotate is delivering the nuance that enterprise AI applications need. Read more.
lakeFS: Versioning the way to enterprise AI innovation
Long before the “everything better with AI” fervor swept the enterprise, lakeFS co-founders Einat Orr and Oz Katz saw an opportunity to help streamline and ensure data integrity for data science and engineering workflows with a novel, yet proven approach: manage the data like code. “Git-for-data” was the idea and that served as the basis for the company’s eponymous open-source project.
“Versioning is no longer something that a tool does for someone. It is an organizational infrastructure for the data that anyone who uses data in the organization can enjoy. And that infrastructure needs to support all data types, from all data sources, for the company’s AI needs,” Orr shared with us. Read more.
TheLoops 🤝 IFS
After years of expertly navigating the twists, lumps and bumps of startup growth to deliver agentic customer intelligence to the enterprise, TheLoops is being acquired by IFS, a leading provider of enterprise cloud and industrial AI software.
As the first investor in leading TheLoops’ seed round, DTC is grateful to have worked with an outstanding team, driven by purpose, resilience, and innovation. Congrats to Somya Kapoor , Ravi Bulusu and team!
That's all for this edition of the Start to Scale newsletter. We'll be back soon with more innovator profiles, new episodes of First Commit with Nina Lu, and more.