Valhalla focuses on the following industry sectors:

Digital Media

We invest in businesses that take advantage of technologies and business models emerging around digital media. Some examples are:

  • Online marketing that result in favorable customer acquisition and retention marketing
  • Online advertising that offers better targeting and economics for advertisers and publishers
  • Content creation and analysis tools for web content
  • Platforms and applications that leverage the programmable web
  • E-commerce models leveraging direct-to-consumer and peer-to-peer transactions
  • Vertical search engines that serve unique needs of communities
  • Applications that improve the utility of social and professional network
  • Content creation, visualization and analysis tools for audio, video, image and text
  • Distribution and monetization of user generated content
  • Distribution of content from traditional media publishers

A particular subsector of interest is mobile digital content. There are more than two billion mobile subscribers globally with increasing functionality and decreasing service prices. Key mobile sub-sectors for Valhalla include:

  • Search and advertising
  • Consumer entertainment, including games, music, and video
  • Content and application management and distribution
  • Communication, including video sharing, SMS, MMS, and social networking
  • Enterprise and consumer applications

Next Generation Infrastructure

Some of the largest growth opportunities in IT come when an older infrastructure needs replacement. Identifying emerging trends in infrastructure and investing in pioneering companies at the moment when those markets explode have provided us with some of our most compelling investments over time, and will continue to do so in the future.

In particular, data is growing at a rapid pace (50-100%/year) and this breakneck growth is creating intense pain points for storage customers. We invest in leaders in emerging categories that can grow to multi-billion dollar markets. We partner with the entrepreneurs to help build sustainable independent companies, while recognizing the importance of the OEM channel.

We invest in infrastructure providers for:

  • Voice, data, and video networks
  • Next-generation data centers
  • Enterprise IT and systems management
  • “Last mile” connectivity
  • Online commerce and advertising
  • Computing in the cloud
  • Applications for storage, distribution, and management of digital media
  • Data protection
  • Data movement, classification & management
  • Ethernet/iSCSI
  • Disaster recovery
  • Grid/clustering/virtualization
  • Wide area data/file services
  • Next generation storage service providers
Software is also undergoing a sea change, driven by innovation in delivering software as a service (SaaS) and in traditional enterprise software applications and infrastructure. We are interested in all aspects of enterprise software including software for:
  • Application and integration infrastructure
  • Development and testing
  • Systems management
  • Business intelligence and analytics
  • Security
  • Storage
  • Internet traffic management
  • Supply chain management
  • Customer relationship management
  • Enterprise resource planning
  • Sourcing and procurement
  • Collaborative commerce
  • Business process automation
Technology Buyouts and Spin outs

Buyout transactions are often the vehicle for public companies to go private. By operating as a private company, they are better able to focus on business fundamentals and long-term shareholder value creation. We can leverage our company-building expertise, domain knowledge and relationships in the technology ecosystem to help newly private companies.

Large corporations periodically "spin-out" small groups within their organizations which are not a close fit with their long-term strategic direction. These "spin-outs" are frequently quality businesses that can succeed on their own with sufficient capital and the right leadership. We are interested in playing an active role in facilitating such transactions and helping to nurture the new independent businesses.

Pioneers

We are always looking for new "market defining" ventures and revolutionary technologies. To do so, we are willing to look outside the scope of traditional venture capital markets.