WVV is Venture Capital for the Age of AI. We believe AI startups need access to proprietary data sets to give them an edge. We work with the world’s largest and most data-rich companies to build data partnerships with data-hungry startups.
The motivation for our unique approach to building data partnerships came to Dr. Franklin when he was a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University working on data-intensive computing. He recognized that many of his academic projects worked on artificially small data sets and as a result had limited real-world applicability in the era of Internet-scale systems. Further he recognized that access to proprietary large scale data sets could be a key factor in research and commercial success.
Driven by the goal of bridging the gap between academia and industry, he worked with a team of researchers to develop an early prototype of a data-intensive cluster build for scalability and performance. This work was named FAWN: Fast Array of Wimpy Nodes and became an early prototype of enterprise Flash memory which would fundamentally change how data centers were architected and later grow to a multi-billion dollar market. In recognition for the practical impact of his research, Dr. Franklin was awarded the Allen Newell Award for Computer Science, a prestigious award named after one of the founders of Artificial Intelligence.
Wanting to continue his push to commercialize academic and industry breakthroughs in the data space, Dr. Franklin worked with leading companies in data-rich spaces including manufacturing, health care, building technology, and insurance to form WVV and the Data+Capital strategy with its hallmark data partnership focus.