NVCA Member Spotlight: Shadow Ventures

Welcome to our Member Spotlight series where we give a profile overview of our many diverse members. For this deep dive, we spoke to KP Reddy, Founder and CEO at Shadow Ventures to learn more about his firm.

What makes your firm unique?

Let’s start with what we’re not: we have zero ivy league MBA’s with investment banking pedigree. From our point of view, that’s not what early stage tech investing is about. Shadow is composed of entrepreneurs, technologists, and industry operators who still write code, obsess over long data sets, and yearn for the daily in-the-trenches grind of operating startups. Founders crave working with investors who’ve been in their shoes. Between our core investment team, we have deep experience as tech operators within the built environment and have a combined 5 exits as founders (1 IPO, 1 sale to a public company, 2 private sales, 1 buy-out) and 2 additional exits as employees.

What inspired the name of your firm?

Like a shadow that cannot be grasped, we aim to be the invisible force driving real influence for built environment founders.

What defines your portfolio? 

We are self-proclaimed nerds and obsessive entrepreneurs at heart and we have a bias towards funding people like us. They might not check every resume box so to speak, but all have some exceptional traits. Each company is solving for a deeper, more systemic issues facing the built environment than what might appear at the surface – some examples being the affordable housing crisis (ICON), our failing bridges and roads (Aren), Local Logic (quantifying how cities should be developed), to name a few.

How has your firm evolved from its founding to today?

Starting a new VC firm is a grind. We had to figure out how to scale our time/energy better. We took a little bit of our own medicine to do that: invest in tech. We have a full-time CTO that built our sourcing engine, portfolio management CRM, and a marketing distribution platform for startups.

Why is your firm an NVCA member?

NVCA is setting a higher bar for education and standards for our industry. They are the trust layer. Private markets benefit from leaders like NVCA otherwise it’s the wild west.

Describe your firm’s culture in 5 words or less?

Obsessive, systematic, leveraged, and…cool:)

NVCA Member Spotlight is sponsored by American Express

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