What a momentous year 2017 has been and the year is ending with incredible inertia leading into the New Year. The year which started off with the sale of my previous startup Pristine Environments has been a journey from the complex to the sublime, working along the way with incredible founders, entrepreneurs, investors and technologists who are all changing the world of the built environment.
For Impala Ventures we have invested in several company's we are incredibly stoked about and have worked on numerous strategic initiatives for groups that we advise. This has been a year full of ideas, collaboration and steps forward in the direction of our next set of full scale ventures.
With the Founders 10x10 interview series, we sat down with founders and companies in the fields of Robotics & Artificial Intelligence, the Smart Home, Sustainable Design, Lithium extraction technology, innovative financing for energy efficiency like PACE; to the sustainable Ag sector of better-than-organic products to the ever well covered IoT sector.
In 2018 we will kick off the Founders 10x10 series with interviews with Power Scout Ceo/ Founder Attila Toth on the digital tools required for energy markets and with Ceo/Founder of Assess+RE, Min Suh who has created Argus killing software for evaluating/modeling institutional real estate investments for REITS and investors alike. In this world of built spaces that is being transformed with technology coupled with an increasingly connected diaspora of intelligent products, Impala Ventures is committed to covering the issues and companies changing the landscape.
Our research and conference speaking has been focused on the convergence of IoT, data analytics & digitization of commercial spaces and the transformation of financial products to speed up the deployment of renewable energy sources at scale. We are also working with one of our founders on his second platform, this time in the zero emission aviation space. Think Tesla for planes.
In June we held our first Investor Forum hosted during the IBCON intelligent building conference along with host Latham & Watkins and industry sponsor CleanTech San Diego. This was an opportunity for several of the companies we advise to present to a group of VC's and industry experts. The forum was attended by GE Ventures, ABB Ventures, Qualcomm Ventures, Newmark Knight Frank/Energy, Orrick, Cooley, Latham & Watkins and several other technology LP's for an engaging discussion focused on the "Connected Machine" and the digitization of real estate.
Good press always helps as we were featured in a Hufffington Post interview this summer which covered the impact of innovative investment strategies and technology. Thanks to Carlos Gutierrez for covering topics of interest to entrepreneurs and the VC community.
For those companies that have generously given Impala Ventures the opportunity to invest and advise them on their growth and to the avant garde founders that we interviewed for our Founders 10x10, I am personally grateful for the relationships we have forged and look forward to a healthy, and value creating 2018.
