About

Genacast Ventures is a leading venture capital firm in the Northeast investing in the most promising B2B technology startups at the seed-stage.

Our DNA as technology founders and operators gives us unique insight into the challenges faced by new companies

How we add value

Lead Investor

Lead Investor

As a lead investor at the seed stage, we can work with founders to set the terms of the round. We also play an active board role by coaching management teams to turn validated product ideas into real companies.

Perspective

Perspective

Our experience running and investing in startups gives us additional insight into the challenges that our companies face. Mistakes are unavoidable but we want you to make new mistakes, not the old ones.

Network

Network

We have deep networks in the industries we invest in and will help our companies build relevant connections with potential customers and investors. We are also able to play an active role in hiring 
and team-building.

Technology Focused

Technology Focused

We appreciate technology and look for companies that are using hard technology to solve hard problems.

What We Look For

Great Teams
Great Teams
Great Teams

Edison said: “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” We believe similarly: start-up success is 1% a good idea and 99% execution. A good idea is not enough. It takes a great team with brilliant execution to make a start-up successful.

Capital Efficiency
Capital Efficiency
Capital Efficiency

While we celebrate the multi-hundred million dollar exit, we realize most start-ups will exit below one hundred million dollars and thus need to be capitalized such that all stakeholders win in this scenario. Our incentives are aligned with yours.

Deep Technology
Deep Technology
Deep Technology

We are technology enthusiasts and gravitate towards start-ups with innovative technology that provides competitive advantages. We want to hear about your technical barriers to entry and the difficult engineering challenges that your team has overcome.

Team

Gil Beyda

Gil Beyda

Founder & Managing Partner

Background:

Gil Beyda is a seasoned entrepreneur turned venture capitalist currently investing in blockchain, cybersecurity, IOT and enterprise IT. Drawing from decades of experience with cutting edge technologies, both as a founder and an operator, Beyda looks to invest in startups and later-stage companies solving real problems with cutting-edge technology.

Beyda launched his first company, Mind Games, in 1982 to develop games for the original Apple II. He then started a software consulting firm focused on Fortune 100 clients in the U.S., Asia and Europe. As a co-founder of Real Media, in the mid 1990’s, he helped shepherd the early adoption of internet advertising technology. Later, Beyda became CTO of TACODA, the first behavioral targeting ad network. Following AOL’s acquisition of TACODA in 2007, Beyda founded Genacast Ventures.

What I love about my job:

  • Working with brilliant, passionate entrepreneurs to solve real problems

  • Strategizing with the CEO and architecting with the CTO

  • Getting out of my comfort zone and exploring new industries

  • Falling in love with a startup, diligencing it and still being in love

Portfolio

BigId

BigID

@bigidsecure


Sectors: Security
Location: New York City & Tel Aviv
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series D
Co-Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, ClearSky Security Fund, Comcast Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, SAP, Deep Fork Capital

BigID is a security company focused on helping organizations manage the risk and privacy of their customer Identity data.

Blockdaemon

Blockdaemon

@_blockdaemon


Sectors: Blockchain
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series C
Co-Investors: Tiger Global Management, Sapphire Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund, Lerer Hippeau, Boldstart Ventures, mState, Plug and Play

The simplest and fastest way to spin up nodes and scale decentralized applications.

Confetti

Confetti

@withconfetti


Sectors: B2B
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active
Co-Investors: Correlation Ventures, ERA

Browse through hundreds of ideas for experiences and get connected to amazing, vetted vendors in a one-of-a-kind online catalog.

Datadog

Datadog

@datadoghq


Sectors: DevOps
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Through Acquisition of Mortar Data in 2015
Current Status: IPO (NASDAQ: DDOG)
Co-Investors: Iconiq Capital, Index Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners, RTP Ventures

Datadog is a monitoring service that brings together metrics and events from servers, databases, applications, tools and services to present a unified view of the infrastructure.

Demex

Demex

@demexinc


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Adobe Systems (NASDAQ:ADBE) in 2011.
Co-Investors: First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures

Demdex collects and manages non-personally identifiable behavioral and demographic data on behalf of its clients and provides a platform for the management and enforcement of consumer privacy preferences.

Related:

Adobe Buys Behavioral Data Management Platform DemDex

Divide

Divide

@divide


Sectors: Mobile, Security
Location: New York City, Hong Kong and London
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in 2014. 

Co-Investors: BOLDstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures

Divide helps organizations and individuals get the most out of mobile technology and corporate BYOD policies. The company’s flagship platform combines cloud-based management with device-level technology that ensures enterprise security and control without compromising personal freedom and privacy.

Related:

Google Buys an Enterprise Android Company, Divide (Formerly Known as Enterproid)

DoubleVerify

DoubleVerify

@doubleverify


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Providence Equity Partners in 2017. Read more!

Co-Investors: Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, JMI Equity

DoubleVerify is a pioneer in online media verification. They increase online advertising accountability and transparency by providing agencies, marketers, publishers and ad networks with real-time audit and verification of online advertising transactions and helping them take proactive measures to avoid waste and maintain brand reputation.

DrayNow

DrayNow

@draynow


Sectors: Transportation
Location: Philadelphia 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series A
Co-Investors: Comcast Ventures, Osage Venture Partners

DrayNow brings common sense solutions powered by technology to the Intermodal Industry.  By eliminating barriers between Brokers and Truckers, DrayNow's technology harmonizes Intermodal and gives control, flexibility and service. DrayNow Delivers Opportunity.

Invite Media

Invite Media

@invitemedia


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City and Philadelphia  
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in 2010.
Co-Investors: Comcast Ventures, First Round Capital, Great Oaks VC

Invite Media allows agencies, ad networks and media buyers to execute and manage campaigns across multiple ad exchanges in real-time, all through one interface. Flagship product Bid Manager is a next-generation ad server and buying console, and is also directly integrated with multiple third party data providers. Over 30 agencies, ad networks, and media buyers are currently using Bid Manager, which now has access to over 10 billion impressions per day.

Related:

Google Confirms Invite Media Acquisition, Brings Bidding To Display Ads

Meet The 24-Year-Old Who Just Sold A $70 Million Company To Google

Jornaya

Jornaya

@jornaya


Sectors: Marketing
Location: Philadelphia  
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Verisk (Nasdaq:VRSK) in 2020.
Co-Investors: Comcast Ventures, Edison Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners

Jornaya is the consumer journey insight platform that provides marketers, data analysts, and compliance professionals with the highest-resolution view of the consumer buying journey. It is the only technology platform that witnesses both first- and third-party consumer interactions in real time and across devices. Meeting consumers at these moments of intent enables businesses to shorten the distance between data, decision, and action. Jornaya seamlessly integrates with any buyer journey decisioning process or toolkit.

Mortar Data

Mortar Data

@mortardata


Sectors: Big Data
Location: New York City  
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Datadog in 2015. Read more!
Co-Investors: Great Oaks VC, Techstars, Right Side Capital Management

Mortar seamlessly unites the best technologies for working with data in one simple, solid, scalable platform. Data scientists and engineers use Mortar's instant feedback tools to develop data applications quickly, then run them at scale with a single command. Mortar's mission is to help data engineers and data scientists spend 100% of their time on problems specific to their business, instead of wasting countless hours setting up infrastructure and building complex pipelines from scratch.

Related:

DataDog Acquires Mortar Data To Tie Analytics To Monitoring

Data Dog Acquired Big Data Analytics & App-Building Platform Mortar Data

Overlap

Overlap

@overlapcc


Sectors: Enterprise IT
Location: New York City  
Investment Stage: Incubation
Current Status: Closed
Co-Investors: NYC Seed

Overlap makes scheduling meetings easy.

Revmetrix

Revmetrix

@revmetrix


Sectors: Marketing
Location: Washington DC 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Closed
Co-Investors: .406 Ventures, Neu Venture Capital

Revmetrix is a customer intelligence platform custom-built for omni-channel retailers. Our technology helps retailers leverage their own customer data to paint a detailed picture of customer behavior as it spans across multiple channels and devices. By doing so, Revmetrix enables retailers to build better, smarter interactions at every point of engagement for their shoppers.

Related:

Revmetrix launches with $2.2M and a claim to the truest omnichannel view of the customer

Rocketrip

Rocketrip

@rocketrip


Sectors: Corporate Travel
Location: New York City 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Mondee Holdings in 2020.
Co-Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Crunchfund, Google Ventures, YCombinator

Rocketrip provides an incentive based platform to businesses which significantly reduces T&E costs by aligning employee interests with company policy.

Staq

Staq

@staq


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City and Baltimore 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Operative in 2021.
Co-Investors: Core Capital, Kinetic Ventures

STAQ makes ad operations more efficient by unifying 175+ ad technology platforms (exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, CRM, etc.) through centralizing reporting, management and optimization. 

Uptycs

Uptycs

@uptycs


Sectors: Security, DevOps
Location: Boston
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series B
Co-Investors: Sapphire Ventures, ForgePoint Capital, Comcast Ventures

Uptycs provides a SaaS solution for IT system management, anomaly detection and incident response using an open-source universal agent, osquery, capable of exposing all system metrics across major operating systems as virtual SQL tables. Based on the power of SQL, the Uptycs solution provides native metrics and alerting for DevOps and Security and a platform for building in-depth IT workflows. This is ideal for workforces with limited resources that are juggling Security and DevOps by providing one destination for anomaly detection, system analytics, adversary hunting and analyst collaboration, all derived from real-time and historical data gathered by the osquery open-source agent.

YieldMo

YieldMo

@yieldmo


Sectors: Advertising, Mobile
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series C. They're hiring!
Co-Investors: ff Venture Capital, Google Ventures, Time Warner Investments, Union Square Ventures

YieldMo is rethinking mobile advertising to optimize yield for publishers, ROI for marketers, and the experience for consumers. YieldMo’s Premium Private Platform for Mobile enables marketers to purchase high quality non-banner ad inventory in YieldMo’s proprietary, consumer-friendly ad formats on the mobile pages and apps of premium publishers. 

ZeroFox

ZeroFox

@zerofox


Sectors: Security, Social
Location: Baltimore
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: IPO under symbol NASDAQ:ZFOX
Co-Investors: Core Capital, Highland Capital Partners, NEA

ZeroFOX provides enterprise grade security technology dedicated to identifying, monitoring and preventing risk across the socially connected enterprise. ZeroFOX's predictive analytics identifies malicious actors and entities before they attack businesses and government organizations.

BigID

@bigidsecure


Sectors: Security
Location: New York City & Tel Aviv
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series D
Co-Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, ClearSky Security Fund, Comcast Ventures, BOLDstart Ventures, SAP, Deep Fork Capital

BigID is a security company focused on helping organizations manage the risk and privacy of their customer Identity data.

Blockdaemon

@_blockdaemon


Sectors: Blockchain
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series C
Co-Investors: Tiger Global Management, Sapphire Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund, Lerer Hippeau, Boldstart Ventures, mState, Plug and Play

The simplest and fastest way to spin up nodes and scale decentralized applications.

Confetti

@withconfetti


Sectors: B2B
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active
Co-Investors: Correlation Ventures, ERA

Browse through hundreds of ideas for experiences and get connected to amazing, vetted vendors in a one-of-a-kind online catalog.

Datadog

@datadoghq


Sectors: DevOps
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Through Acquisition of Mortar Data in 2015
Current Status: IPO (NASDAQ: DDOG)
Co-Investors: Iconiq Capital, Index Ventures, OpenView Venture Partners, RTP Ventures

Datadog is a monitoring service that brings together metrics and events from servers, databases, applications, tools and services to present a unified view of the infrastructure.

Demex

@demexinc


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Adobe Systems (NASDAQ:ADBE) in 2011.
Co-Investors: First Round Capital, Shasta Ventures

Demdex collects and manages non-personally identifiable behavioral and demographic data on behalf of its clients and provides a platform for the management and enforcement of consumer privacy preferences.

Related:

Adobe Buys Behavioral Data Management Platform DemDex

Divide

@divide


Sectors: Mobile, Security
Location: New York City, Hong Kong and London
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in 2014. 

Co-Investors: BOLDstart Ventures, Comcast Ventures, Google Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures

Divide helps organizations and individuals get the most out of mobile technology and corporate BYOD policies. The company’s flagship platform combines cloud-based management with device-level technology that ensures enterprise security and control without compromising personal freedom and privacy.

Related:

Google Buys an Enterprise Android Company, Divide (Formerly Known as Enterproid)

DoubleVerify

@doubleverify


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Providence Equity Partners in 2017. Read more!

Co-Investors: Blumberg Capital, First Round Capital, Institutional Venture Partners, JMI Equity

DoubleVerify is a pioneer in online media verification. They increase online advertising accountability and transparency by providing agencies, marketers, publishers and ad networks with real-time audit and verification of online advertising transactions and helping them take proactive measures to avoid waste and maintain brand reputation.

DrayNow

@draynow


Sectors: Transportation
Location: Philadelphia 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series A
Co-Investors: Comcast Ventures, Osage Venture Partners

DrayNow brings common sense solutions powered by technology to the Intermodal Industry.  By eliminating barriers between Brokers and Truckers, DrayNow's technology harmonizes Intermodal and gives control, flexibility and service. DrayNow Delivers Opportunity.

Invite Media

@invitemedia


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City and Philadelphia  
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Google Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) in 2010.
Co-Investors: Comcast Ventures, First Round Capital, Great Oaks VC

Invite Media allows agencies, ad networks and media buyers to execute and manage campaigns across multiple ad exchanges in real-time, all through one interface. Flagship product Bid Manager is a next-generation ad server and buying console, and is also directly integrated with multiple third party data providers. Over 30 agencies, ad networks, and media buyers are currently using Bid Manager, which now has access to over 10 billion impressions per day.

Related:

Google Confirms Invite Media Acquisition, Brings Bidding To Display Ads

Meet The 24-Year-Old Who Just Sold A $70 Million Company To Google

Jornaya

@jornaya


Sectors: Marketing
Location: Philadelphia  
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Verisk (Nasdaq:VRSK) in 2020.
Co-Investors: Comcast Ventures, Edison Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners

Jornaya is the consumer journey insight platform that provides marketers, data analysts, and compliance professionals with the highest-resolution view of the consumer buying journey. It is the only technology platform that witnesses both first- and third-party consumer interactions in real time and across devices. Meeting consumers at these moments of intent enables businesses to shorten the distance between data, decision, and action. Jornaya seamlessly integrates with any buyer journey decisioning process or toolkit.

Mortar Data

@mortardata


Sectors: Big Data
Location: New York City  
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Datadog in 2015. Read more!
Co-Investors: Great Oaks VC, Techstars, Right Side Capital Management

Mortar seamlessly unites the best technologies for working with data in one simple, solid, scalable platform. Data scientists and engineers use Mortar's instant feedback tools to develop data applications quickly, then run them at scale with a single command. Mortar's mission is to help data engineers and data scientists spend 100% of their time on problems specific to their business, instead of wasting countless hours setting up infrastructure and building complex pipelines from scratch.

Related:

DataDog Acquires Mortar Data To Tie Analytics To Monitoring

Data Dog Acquired Big Data Analytics & App-Building Platform Mortar Data

Overlap

@overlapcc


Sectors: Enterprise IT
Location: New York City  
Investment Stage: Incubation
Current Status: Closed
Co-Investors: NYC Seed

Overlap makes scheduling meetings easy.

Revmetrix

@revmetrix


Sectors: Marketing
Location: Washington DC 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Closed
Co-Investors: .406 Ventures, Neu Venture Capital

Revmetrix is a customer intelligence platform custom-built for omni-channel retailers. Our technology helps retailers leverage their own customer data to paint a detailed picture of customer behavior as it spans across multiple channels and devices. By doing so, Revmetrix enables retailers to build better, smarter interactions at every point of engagement for their shoppers.

Related:

Revmetrix launches with $2.2M and a claim to the truest omnichannel view of the customer

Rocketrip

@rocketrip


Sectors: Corporate Travel
Location: New York City 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Mondee Holdings in 2020.
Co-Investors: Bessemer Venture Partners, Canaan Partners, Crunchfund, Google Ventures, YCombinator

Rocketrip provides an incentive based platform to businesses which significantly reduces T&E costs by aligning employee interests with company policy.

Staq

@staq


Sectors: Advertising
Location: New York City and Baltimore 
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Acquired by Operative in 2021.
Co-Investors: Core Capital, Kinetic Ventures

STAQ makes ad operations more efficient by unifying 175+ ad technology platforms (exchanges, DSPs, SSPs, ad servers, CRM, etc.) through centralizing reporting, management and optimization. 

Uptycs

@uptycs


Sectors: Security, DevOps
Location: Boston
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series B
Co-Investors: Sapphire Ventures, ForgePoint Capital, Comcast Ventures

Uptycs provides a SaaS solution for IT system management, anomaly detection and incident response using an open-source universal agent, osquery, capable of exposing all system metrics across major operating systems as virtual SQL tables. Based on the power of SQL, the Uptycs solution provides native metrics and alerting for DevOps and Security and a platform for building in-depth IT workflows. This is ideal for workforces with limited resources that are juggling Security and DevOps by providing one destination for anomaly detection, system analytics, adversary hunting and analyst collaboration, all derived from real-time and historical data gathered by the osquery open-source agent.

YieldMo

@yieldmo


Sectors: Advertising, Mobile
Location: New York City
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: Active, Series C. They're hiring!
Co-Investors: ff Venture Capital, Google Ventures, Time Warner Investments, Union Square Ventures

YieldMo is rethinking mobile advertising to optimize yield for publishers, ROI for marketers, and the experience for consumers. YieldMo’s Premium Private Platform for Mobile enables marketers to purchase high quality non-banner ad inventory in YieldMo’s proprietary, consumer-friendly ad formats on the mobile pages and apps of premium publishers. 

ZeroFox

@zerofox


Sectors: Security, Social
Location: Baltimore
Investment Stage: Seed
Current Status: IPO under symbol NASDAQ:ZFOX
Co-Investors: Core Capital, Highland Capital Partners, NEA

ZeroFOX provides enterprise grade security technology dedicated to identifying, monitoring and preventing risk across the socially connected enterprise. ZeroFOX's predictive analytics identifies malicious actors and entities before they attack businesses and government organizations.

What we're thinking about?

The AI-Powered Enterprise

The AI-Powered Enterprise

As big data and big compute become more available and more efficient to access, we expect to see a wave of new startups using machine learning technology to optimize the enterprise. From fine-tuning marketing spend to predicting accounts receivables, all aspects of the enterprise will be impacted.

Adaptive Cybersecurity

Adaptive Cybersecurity

Cyberattack threats are now a top concern for all enterprises. Malicious actors are increasingly sophisticated and vulnerabilities in new media and the Internet of Things are opening the door to additional attack vectors for these cybercriminals. The need for advanced security technology is more important than ever.

Disruptive Vertical SaaS

Disruptive Vertical SaaS

The advantages of the Software-as- a-Service model aren't limited to the traditional large enterprise. Mid-market companies and niche industries recognize that they must become more agile and adopt new technologies in order to stay competitive. We're excited by startups building software for hidden markets.

The Industrial

The Industrial "Edge" Stack

The increasing demand for connected hardware and real-time processing at the edge of the network (ie. IoT devices, drones, autonomous vehicles) is feeding into a need for computing power at the edge alongside the datacenter. We are interested in infrastructure bets needed to support this.

B2B Marketplaces

B2B Marketplaces

Digital marketplaces are changing traditional business sectors, opening new markets and growth opportunities to manufacturers, distributors, and service providers. In many cases, transactions are becoming more efficient through dynamic pricing and purchase automation.

Frontier Technology

Frontier Technology

While others were investing in hardware, we’re excited about software. Software that accelerates neural networks and quantum computing capabilities is at the core of enterprise transformation.

Recent News

 

Dimitri Sirota

Working with Gil and the Genacast team through the initial phases of the engagement has impressed me both in depth and style. They get enterprise-focused companies and approach problems collaboratively not competitively.

Dimitri Sirota

BigID

Dan Ruch

Gil’s efforts were instrumental in getting Rocketrip off the ground. We wouldn’t be where we are today if not for him, period

Dan Ruch

Rocketrip (Acquired)

Ross Shanken

Genacast has been instrumental to Jornaya’s growth, and to me personally as a founder and CEO. Genacast is well connected to the VC & Growth Equity markets, and Gil’s track record of success helps make virtually any introduction across the venture community a positive one.

Ross Shanken

Jornaya (Acquired)

Andrew Toy

Genacast mentored us all the way through our growth and then eventual acquisition by Google. They’re definitely the kind of investors you need with you in the trenches.

Andrew Toy

Divide (Acquired)

Randy Nicolau

When Genacast invested in Demdex, it was just me and a Powerpoint. They were instrumental in helping close enterprise customers and securing follow-on funding, which led to our eventual sale to Adobe.

Randy Nicolau

Demdex (Acquired)

K Young

Gil was consistently available, positive, and thoughtful in the assistance he gave Mortar. From the moment Genacast invested until the moment Mortar exited, Genacast was a pleasure to work with

K Young

Mortar Data (Acquired)