Building Better: Impact Venture Capital and Cornomi
Welcome to the NVCA Blog series, Building Better, where we celebrate the dynamic relationship between our VC members and their innovative portfolio companies around the nation. For today’s Building Better, we spoke to Jack Crawford of Impact Venture Capital & Gordie Campbell of Cornami. Learn about their partnership in the Q&A below!
Impact Venture Capital
Give us some background on your firm: How did the firm start, what is your mission and how does the firm strive to meet its goals?
Impact Venture Capital was launched in 2016 by our Founding General Partners, Eric Ball and Jack Crawford. Eric and Jack met through the Kauffman Fellows program and worked closely together managing Oracle’s venture portfolio. Following more than 100 acquisitions by Oracle and a venture portfolio including 180 startup companies, the two discovered how valuable the insights of a large corporate investor and acquirer can have on mitigating the risk of seed stage investments and accelerating their timelines to acquisition.
Like many great venture firms, Impact Venture Capital invests in seed-stage AI companies focused on security, finance, and digital health. However, Jack and Eric wanted to take full advantage of everything corporate venture groups and corporate M&A teams had to offer. To that end, Impact Venture Capital differentiates itself through deep collaboration with a broad network of corporate investors. These corporate partners serve as market experts, customers, and co-investors for our portfolio companies. We believe we benefit our corporate investors by acting like scouts for deals strategically relevant by stage and industry sector. We have developed an active working relationship with more than 200 corporate investors. The market insights provided by these corporate investors has elevated our investing IQ at the seed level, enhanced our selection process, mitigated the risk of seed investments, and accelerated the path of our portfolio companies to successful exits.
What does your firm look for in a partner when choosing to invest in a portfolio company? What does the firm value? What do you especially value in the Cornami’s team?
Like all good investors, we’re looking for exceptionally gifted founders solving incredibly important problems. We value industry experience highly and are looking for a credible argument that a startup’s market is at an important inflection point. Naturally, we care deeply about startups that are strategically relevant to the corporate investors we work with.
Cornami was a clear choice for us. Gordie Campbell and Wally Rhines bring decades of chip industry experience, with multiple successful exits totaling $5 billion. Their AI chips are crucial for many top corporations, including our co-investors: Applied Materials, Qualcomm, Softbank, and more. These founders have the intelligence, experience, vision, and urgency to succeed, along with strong listening and sales skills.
How does Impact Venture Capital support its portfolio companies? How does it help entrepreneurs grow and advance the VC industry?
Strategic guidance, curated introductions, and capital are the key ways in which we find ourselves supporting our portfolio companies. At Cornami, we covered payroll with timely investments in the early days, helped recruit the current CEO and some key board members, guided the company toward the fully homomorphic encryption market to support product-market fit, and led two of the four rounds of funding so they could assemble $100M+ of follow-on capital. Our level of activity includes a standard weekly call with the CEO and the founder regarding how we can best help with ideas and connections. In Cornami’s situation, it’s been amazing to see the company track from an idea to 60+ issued patents to a team of 50+ employees on their path to creating an AI chip that will revolutionize the industry over the next 12 months.
Q&A with Cornami
What is the mission of your company and how did you start?
Provide the first absolute cybersecurity for user information in the cloud, large language models and blockchain transactions. Cornami, named for a “tsunami of cores”, began by developing unique compiler software to parallelize any computer program or data. A chip architecture based upon this software was developed using a “share nothing” architecture so that the performance of computing applications would increase as the number of compute cores per chip and the number of chips in a computer system increased. As a result, computation can be performed upon data while it remains encrypted. Performance is comparable to the same computation on unencrypted data but, with Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE), no one but the user has a key and the computer program remains encrypted at all times with a secure quantum-proof form of encryption, even during computation.
Where and how is your company looking to grow into the next 5 years?
Most users of computers would prefer the security of FHE that DARPA refers to as “The Holy Grail of Cybersecurity” if the cost is nearly the same as traditional forms of security. This requires acceleration of computing by about one million times that of a typical Intel server. Cornami expects about half of the $100B annual semiconductor market for servers to add this capability within the next five years by purchasing servers and add-in cards from Cornami. Creators and users of large language models (LLMs) currently have to secure their own proprietary “fine tuning” data behind their own firewalls because of the sensitivity of that information. With FHE, LLMs can be made available in the cloud where encrypted queries can be made to the encrypted model and plaintext data is never exposed.
What problem is your company trying to solve?
Provide the ability for owners of valuable information to share it (for a price) with others while never divulging the actual data. With this capability, Cornami will revolutionize generative AI with secure LLMs that can be hosted in the cloud without exposing proprietary information.
How has Impact Venture Capital impacted your company’s future for the better?
Impact Venture Capital, under Jack Crawford, was the first VC firm to fund the initial innovations at Cornami. Impact has remained a key source of funding and has provided advice, help in bringing other investors to Cornami, connections with future customers and encouragement. Cornami would not exist today if we had not connected with Impact Venture Capital.
