After six years at Bessemer Venture Partners, Sunil Nagaraj has founded Ubiquity Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in software beyond the screen with a focus on startups in smart hardware and machine intelligence applications.

Ubiquity Ventures’ debut fund is a $30m vehicle that will make investments of up to $2m in startups as early as inception stage. Ubiquity invests behind a unique and specific theme: software leaping off the screen and entering the real world. So far, its nine investments span start-ups that enable dairy farmers to herd their cattle from their smartphones, carmakers to train self-driving cars before putting them on the road, and factory robots to move with life-like precision. Ubiquity is passionate about software, often driven by machine learning, that empowers devices to play new roles in our lives--whether that is in agriculture, mobility, or manufacturing.

“Nerdy and early is my mantra,” said Nagaraj, Founder and Managing Partner of Ubiquity Ventures. “I aim to be the investor that is most like the founders I invest in. I spend at least one day a week coding, soldering or showing my young daughter the basics of engineering. This is crucial to understanding the nascent technologies in which I invest and connecting with founders I seek to back. Being technical is in my DNA,” said Nagaraj. “By starting a tightly-focused firm, I can move at founder speed, giving high-potential teams early capital so they can get to market as fast as possible without jumping through hoops.”

As an entrepreneur himself, Nagaraj takes a founder-centric approach to investing. Prioritizing transparency, coaching, and working hand-in-hand with the CEOs of Ubiquity-backed companies. “Sunil was the seed investor I could turn to at a moment’s notice for help with product, growth, or recruiting,” said Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier.

Nagaraj brings over a decade of Silicon Valley experience to Ubiquity Ventures, split between time as VC-backed founder/CEO and as a venture capitalist. Augmenting him is an unparalleled team of technologists and growth experts who offer Ubiquity-backed startups rich expertise in smart hardware and machine learning as well as marketing and sales support. This Ubiquity Extended Team includes former executives at Facebook, Slack, Pinterest, AirBnB, Stripe, Dropbox, Tile and more.

ABOUT UBIQUITY VENTURES
Ubiquity Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm in Palo Alto, California focused on early-stage investments in promising deep technology companies. Leveraging almost a decade of institutional venture capital experience, Sunil Nagaraj leads Ubiquity Ventures to fund startups pushing software beyond the screen with a focus on smart hardware and machine intelligence applications. With an extended team of over 30 experts with technical and marketing expertise, Ubiquity Ventures aims to deliver superior returns through providing funding and development assistance to promising companies to position them for accelerated growth. More at http://www.ubiquity.vc