WVV Investor Spotlight: Jason Franklin, Ph.D. — CEO and Managing Director
I’m Jason Franklin, Ph.D., the CEO and Founding Managing Director of WVV Capital (WVV). WVV is a $100 million joint venture between Advocate Aurora Health, Foxconn, Johnson Controls, and Northwestern Mutual. At WVV, we are innovating on a new approach to corporate venture through close partnerships with startups and corporations, utilization of deep stores of corporate expertise and datasets, and investments based on novel theses generated by identifying new opportunities in interdisciplinary markets at the intersection of health, manufacturing, smart buildings, and financial services.
From the Midwest to Silicon Valley
By background, I obtained a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University and received the 2012 Allen Newell Award (named after one of Artificial Intelligence’s founding fathers). I used to perform research in systems, security, and storage, and am the co-inventor of enterprise flash-storage array technology as well as numerous security technologies. Prior to CMU, I graduated with majors in Computer Science and Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I now sit on the advisory board of the n+1 Institute. These days I focus on helping others build their companies and advance the state of enterprise technology.
Prior to my career in venture capital, I worked as a staff research scientist and lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University where I co-led DARPA-sponsored cyber-security research. I also co-founded and served as CEO of a mobile security startup that commercialized research developed during my time at Stanford. My work as a founder and at Stanford really propelled me into the venture capital world, where I focus on helping founders commercialize highly-technical technology.
Investments
I’ve had the opportunity to learn venture capital by working at some amazing investment firms, including an Eric Schmidt-backed fund and Andreessen Horowitz. Some of my representative investments from this time include Primer.ai in the natural language processing and generation market, Apex.ai and DeepMap (acq. Nvidia) in the self-driving space and StackRox (acq. RedHat) in the enterprise security space.
In the current WVV portfolio I work closely with Caspar.AI in the senior-care market, SignalWire in the Software Defined Telecom market, Syntegra in digital health data, XaiPient in marketing analytics and a stealth-mode company in the edge data center space. Underlying all of my investments are deep technical underpinnings that have the potential to transform industries and impact large markets.
One recent focus area has been the area of investing in cross-disciplinary markets for which success requires partnerships between multiple organizations in seemingly disparate areas. For example, consider the emerging market of Healthy Buildings and Indoor Air Quality. Success in this market requires expertise and technologies from Smart Buildings, Health, and potentially Insurance. Other examples include the GreyTech or Senior Care market, where Smart Building technology, Health and Insurance are all part of the solution to long-term senior health and wellness. There are many additional examples of where our corporate partners’ expertise in health, manufacturing, smart buildings, and financial technologies intersect and can be helpful to emerging startups working in cross-disciplinary markets, and WVV is uniquely-positioned to help founders capitalize on these types of opportunities.
Looking ahead: The impact of AI on traditional industries
As Computer Science, AI and Robotics grow increasingly powerful, we are beginning to see new opportunities for technology to impact traditional markets that were not previously accessible or at risk of disruption. I expect the outcome of these new innovations to be particularly impactful in traditional industries such as healthcare, manufacturing, and the built environment where technology innovation has to date been relatively less disruptive (versus enterprise IT or consumer technologies). As computers begin to increasingly move not just bits but atoms and thereby impact not just the virtual but also the real world, we believe WVV’s unique collection of corporate partners are well-positioned to support emerging startup companies tackling these challenges.
My current investment interests include — but are not limited to — AI-powered technology companies working on health, manufacturing, smart buildings and financial services or the intersection of any subset of these markets. Specific examples include: data science, smart and healthy buildings, data center technology, edge AI, sustainability, autonomous vehicles, web3, metaverse and many many more. We are always on the hunt for startups that can accelerate their growth by collaborating with our corporate partners, and I see my job as helping build that bridge.
If you feel like what you’re working on is a fit for WVV, please get in touch. You can either connect with me directly on LinkedIn, or contact the WVV investment team at info [at] wvvcapital [dot] com.
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