Your Window Into the Innovation Economy

Through Alumni Ventures’ unique model, Nassau Street Ventures and sibling funds are able to access investment opportunities with promising, venture-backed startups.

Solsten, based in Berlin and Minneapolis, uses AI and deep psychological assessment to uncover customer insights and then make them actionable. The company is initially focused on the gaming industry, giving publishers a way to better understand, engage, and monetize their customers. Solsten collects neuropsychological surveys from game users and runs it through an AI engine. They are able to reveal what truly makes a customer tick, trapping 400 psychological data points relating to desires, motivations, values, and personality traits. See below for an interview with Co-Founder and CEO Joe Schaeppi.

Since launching in 1994, Amazon has grown into the largest eCommerce platform in the world. While Amazon has maintained rapid revenue growth, COVID-19 accelerated the company’s profits by nearly 200% in 2020. As larger retailers have put pressure on their own logistics services to keep pace, it’s become clear that traditional fulfillment solutions fall short.

Accurate tracking of a student’s progress towards graduation is an essential, basic task for all schools. However, for school counselors — who are often in charge of tracking graduation requirements — it is actually a highly manual, time-consuming, and error-prone process. Current tracking methods involve counselors printing out binders full of student data and performing audits by hand, resulting in human error and potential bias.

Parallel Markets is a portable identity solution for accredited investors that simplifies investor onboarding by verifying accreditation and KYC/AML information in a single click. Alumni Ventures investment in Parallel Markets was sponsored by AV’s Seed Fund.

Enterprise companies continue to grow the number and size of their datasets — collections of data that hold or store different types of information. A few of the industries working with massive datasets include law enforcement, financial markets, advertising tech, network security, telecommunications, and vehicle telematics. However, current solutions offer limited intake and search speeds, making it difficult to unlock datasets’ full value.

The insurance industry is improving its capabilities and efficiency through insurtech — the adoption of new technology to improve insurance operations. With the global insurtech market expected to grow 48.8% annually from 2021 to 2028, companies adopting technological advances will grow and improve, while those that don’t risk being surpassed by competitors.

Enterprise storage provides businesses with a centralized resource for storing, sharing, and retrieving data. However, this massive $30B industry is facing disruption due to the adoption of container-based software development, which reliably delivers up to 10x higher application density over traditional architectures. A company like Google, for example, creates billions of containers each week. Conventional enterprise storage systems are not designed for these container-driven environments, creating a sizable pain point for enterprise dev-ops and infrastructure teams.