DNX Ventures has been an active investor in disruptive technology/service we’d like to call, “Deeptech” since the firm's inception. Our investments include ICEYE, a microsatellite manufacturer, Movandi, a 5G chipset developer, and Nauto, a mobility data platform, to name a few. We feel there is a dearth of investors who have the heart (and the love) for startups in this particular sector.

DNX Ventures was an early investor in Cylance, helping the company expand its business in Japan. Through that experience and other similar investments, we built our expertise in the cybersecurity sector specializing in its market expansion. The need for security products remains strong in SMBs, enterprises, and even at startups, with the increasing volume and variety of malicious cyber-attacks coupled with the shortage of security talent.

Having some of the largest financial institutions in Asia as our limited partners, we realized that the financial services industry continues to use legacy processes and tools, both internally and to serve their customers, leading to unnecessary costs and inefficiencies. We look for startups armed with cutting-edge new technologies who can revamp the status quo to disrupt every layer of the financial services stack.

We are interested in startups accumulating data across multiple domains, or training domain-specific models over vast data, to provide a holistic view of behaviors, driving toward greater improvements in services, operations, processes, sales, and marketing. SaaS startups often increase visibility and flexibility, and provide optimization and efficiency options for a whole suite of previously labor-intensive business processes (people management, SDR, support, accounting, to name a few). The SaaS model further leads to heavy cloud service utilization, creating an urgent need to manage cloud resources and services with greater efficiency and interoperability. In all this, the services architecture produces more touch points, more complexity, and dependencies which creates new needs of manageability, traceability, risk management and observability.

The field of retail technology, which encompasses a broad array of tools that help retailers manage their operations, is growing quickly. While billions of dollars are already being spent on expanding digital capabilities, we expect the industry will shift somewhat towards a focus on changing consumer behavior to adopt these tech solutions more readily.

With millennials getting into the economic wheel of society, they constitute new consumers and new decision-makers in organizational ladders. It is already clear millennials have much different buying needs and decision criteria than previous generations. Concurrently, new governmental compliance rules and regulations (state or federal) in the process will require significant organizational changes in environmental responsibility and accountability. Investors, government, auditors, and the general population have realized the environmental challenges are near-term issues that we all will have to face. We embrace the intensified urgency, and increase our pace and focus our lens on sustainability for enterprise. More specifically for DNX, this translates into seeking innovations where data and AI, as a service, can be used to serve enterprise sustainability challenges.