Ridgeline Quarterly Update
Updates on deals, portfolio news, and interesting things in our world
Two weeks ago, the Ridgeline team hosted LPs, founders, and a core part of our network in Memphis for our annual meeting and intimate half day summit covering the key topics that inform our thesis. The conversations were wide-ranging, touching upon on geopolitics, emerging technology, and competition dynamics. These topics drive us to continue to find the best founders and technologies that will write the future of U.S. economic leadership across key industries.
The Ridgeline platform is designed to bring the corporate and national security worlds closer to emerging technology and venture capital. Now that it has been built, we are optimizing the platform to bring the most valuable events and relationships directly to our portfolio companies. In most cases, our founders are building technology to solve the challenges our corporate partners are faced with on a daily basis. Ensuring that the portfolio has frequent opportunity to engage with potential customers and partners is a significant aspect of our value-add as a firm.
We opened the summit by featuring retired General Vince Brooks, former CIA Director John Brennan, and Managing Partner of WestExec Advisors, Nitin Chadda. They discussed the state of geopolitics and global competition, sharing their insights on China, the Middle East and the role of digital trust and assurance in maintaining global order.
This year we highlighted a number of portfolio companies throughout the event. Alex Shih, Head of Product at Q-CTRL, and Ian Cadieu, CTO of Altana, provided overview presentations of their products and key customers, both highlighting the role of strategic partners in product development and creating competitive moats. These presentations helped illuminate the use cases and the value proposition of these products in two deep technology areas: quantum computing and supply chain AI, respectively.
Ridgeline partner, Ryan Clinton, then moderated a conversation with John Harris, CEO of Harbinger (Ridgeline portfolio company), and Todd Woelfer, COO of THOR Industries, the world’s largest RV manufacturer. THOR is both a customer of and an investor in Harbinger. A highlight of the day, the conversation showed the massive impact an engaged design partner and champion can have on a deep tech startup. The example of the two companies’ collaboration and THOR’s commitment to modernization show exactly how foundational industries can take leaps forward in technology adoption.
We kicked off the afternoon with an excellent discussion on the enterprise adoption of AI. We were fortunate to have two great friends of the firm, Ryan Swann (Chief Data Analytics Officer of Vanguard) and Justin Fanelli (Chief Technology Officer of the Department of the Navy) sit alongside two portfolio CEOs: Ben Harvey from AI Squared and Kence Anderson from Composabl to bring the perspective from both sides of the technology adoption equation.
The discussion moved from the technology that is driving many of the advances in AI, to best practices around data and change management and the human capital challenges when adopting newer and more dependent technologies.
The closing keynote highlighted the importance of emerging technologies in maintaining competitive advantages across both corporate and national security settings. Michèle Flournoy, WestExec Managing Partner and former DOD Under Secretary for Policy, and Rob Carter, EVP and Chief Information Officer of FedEx, were joined by Ridgeline partner, Ben Walker.
The discussion highlighted the technology journey that FedEx has traversed over the last 50 years, from being one of the first operators of a mobile network to reorienting the company around a data-first architecture. The discussion then moved to how and why the United States should follow the lead of large companies like FedEx in pursuit of maintaining a competitive edge.
Threaded throughout the two days was a consistent theme that emerging, commercial technologies would help modernize the foundational industries across the U.S. economy. Notably, our advisors who have spent careers leading our national security were the most bullish that commercial technology is the key to our competitive edge as an economy and country. We couldn’t agree more.
Our next step is to host intimate conversations like these in cities across the U.S. with our founders, investors, and network. Please reach out to Andrew McMahon [andrew@ridgeline.vc] or Ben Walker [ben@ridgeline.vc] if you would be interested in participating or learning more.
New Investments
Ridgeline led the pre-seed round in Composabl, an industrial AI and automation platform, with Exposition Ventures. See here for more on our investment.
Portfolio Updates
Harbinger added two key investors to its Series A fundraise. Greycroft Coca‑Cola System Sustainability Fund and Arctern both joined the syndicate and added additional capital to the round.
SatVu CEO, Anthony Baker, discussed their tech and business strategy on Bloomberg.
Altana announced a partnership with Dataminr to create real-time alerts and visibility on the customer supply chains.
Neural Magic was extremely busy in Q4, building out and releasing features across their libraries to enable large language model (LLM) inference on CPUs. These features enable any company to leverage LLMs not simply those with access to scarce GPUs.
Ampere Computing and Wallaroo have teamed up to enhance the AI options available on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This collaboration aims to provide more cost-effective and efficient solutions for organizations looking to scale their AI operations.
Eion successfully removed its first tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere deploying its enhanced rock weathering technique commercially for eight months on farms in Mississippi and Illinois. Their technology was also named one of Time Magazine’s best inventions of 2023.
Loft Orbital, a Satellite-as-a-Service company, started seeing growing demand to deploy AI software in space—specifically, software apps that are connected to cloud infrastructure here on Earth. We are excited about a burgeoning partnership between Loft and one of our AI-focused portfolio companies, which we’ll have more to report on when announced.
From the Blog
🦾 Why We Invested In Composabl: Empowering Subject Matter Experts in Industrial Automation
🧪 Ridgeline Founder Stories: Mudiaga Mowoe of Matta is Aggregating Chemical Supply Chains in Africa
Interesting Stuff
There is a lot of commentary and data out there on the state of the VC market given the bumpy ride that was 2023.
Carta has some of the most consistent and believable market data given they have access to all rounds (e.g. up/down, bridge/priced) on their platform and therefore represent a statistically significant sample of the market.
As private investors we pay close attention to public market comps. We are regular readers of Clouded Judgement from Altimeter partner, Jamin Ball. So far, Q4 earnings for cloud giants and a few software vendors have shown good signal that we are though the enterprise efficiency plays of 2022 and 1H 2023.
AI as a category continues to move extremely fast. The tweet below highlights the pressure and pain that startups and enterprises will feel chasing this market.
Must read memo from Howard Marks. Love the callback to his Sea Change memo from 2022 and the analogy of walking on an airport people-mover as what it felt like for many startups in the ZIRP era, while 2023 must have felt like stepping off.
Luckily, Ed Sim, founder + Partner at Boldstart, compiled his notes/thoughts on what building lean actually means: “Back to first Principles Building Startups from Inception” in a Google Docs here.