Ankur Pansari
General Partner at Divide by Zero
Ankur Pansari
General Partner at Divide by Zero
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
General Partner
2021 - Current
$Xm venture capital fund writing $25k - $200k checks into early stage technology companies. We invest across consumer and b2b. Fund 1 investments: - Proper AI (Seed) - Everyday Kitchens fka. Virtual Kitchen Co (Seed) - Jiffy (Seed) - Geologie (Seed) - Prizepool: Seed - CommandDot (Seed) - Confirm (Seed) - Maximus (Seed) - Pace (Seed) - Grata (Seed) - Wax Insurance (Seed) - Dorsal (Seed) - Fuse Inventory (Seed) - Nira (Series A) - Tastenote (Seed) - Curbside Health (Seed) - Neptyne (Preseed) - Rare Candy (Seed) - PatentPal (Pre-Seed) - Aware Health (Seed) - Noetica (Seed) - Studyverse (Seed) - Heylo (Seed) - PetPair (Seed)
Venture Partner
2018
We are a leading seed stage venture capital fund that invests in world class entrepreneurs. We know that finding product market fit is the hardest thing that you can do -- we can help you get there through access to our Product Council with over 100 of the top product leaders from the technology industry. I focus on consumer, real estate, b2b, and food investments and specialize in fundraising and partnership strategy. Deals that I brought to the partnership and/or invested in: - Proper AI - PrizePool - Jiffy - Tone (FKA SaveMySales) - Geologie - CommandDot - Grata - Rally Law My personal angel investments are: - Wealthfront (Series B) - Periscope Data (Angel, Seed) -- Acquired by SiSense - Philz Coffee (Series A) - Arthena (Seed) - Chewse (Seed) - MemSQL (Series C) - iLabService YC S18 (Seed) - apizza (Seed) Limited Partnerships: - March Capital Opportunity Fund (LP, Fund I) - March Capital Opportunity Fund (LP, Fund II) - March Capital Opportunity Fund (LP, Fund III) - Upside Partnership (LP, Fund I) - Lowercase Capital (LP, Frontier Parallel)
Owner
2014 - 2023
Come be our neighbors and enjoy world class living! Condo for sale this summer in partnership with Form + Field Design and John Lum Architects. Former owner/operator of top rated Airbnb destination in Santa Cruz. Guests from around the world voted us 14-time consecutive Superhosts and we were invited to be part of the exclusive Airbnb Plus program. Our property was featured in numerous major design magazines and used to film a segment for Shark Tank's Season 4! Exited with over 28% IRR over 5 years.
CEO
2021 - 2023
Purplemana was an AI collectible marketplace: - Co-wrote computer vision and pricing systems that automatically identified, conditioned, and priced 800,000 trading cards within 900ms. - Spidered 100m price points to generate accurate bid/ask pricing for collectibles - Remotely hired and managed three engineers across time zones and technology stacks - Built core stack using python, javascript, flask, postgres, timescaledb, pytorch, yolo, react, and chatgpt
Head of VC and Startup Partnerships, US West
2018 - 2020
Partnering with VCs and Startups
Partner Engineer
2017 - 2018
Building a profitable partner ecosystem for Google Cloud.
Managing Director
2012 - 2018
6x MOIC fund invested in early stage startups and assist in strategy, fundraising, and partnerships. We have co-invested alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Bling, DFJ, Slow, Foundation, Upside, Lowercase, NEA, Gradient, Mayfield, Social + Capital, and numerous other top funds and publicly traded companies. - Lever (Series A) -- Acquired by Hired.com all cash - Carta (Series A) - MemSQL (Series C) - Pillow (Seed) -- Acquired by Expedia Group (NASDAQ: EXPE) - Periscope Data (Series A) -- Acquired by SiSense - Remote Year (Series A) - Sapling (Seed) - Passport (Seed) - Stensul (Seed) - Blueberry Pediatrics YC W17 (Seed) - Blanket (Seed) LP Position: - Summit Fund (LP, Fund I)
Co-Founder, CEO
2012 - 2016
Artillery was a streaming gaming technology company that was before its time. For four years, I led the company as CEO. We were ultimately unsuccessful in building a giant game streaming platform. - Raised $11m across Seed and Series A rounds from top global investors and corporations - Led distribution partnerships domestically and internationally with Day9TV and Tencent granting access to 10M MAUs. - Led secondary share sale providing liquidity to early investors and employees - Assembled world class team of engineers and artists hailing from Google, Niantic, Palantir, and others
Partnerships
2007 - 2011
- Product Manager, Facebook for Blackberry - Product Manager, Facebook for IPad (Alpha) - Preloaded Facebook on over 100m devices - Founding member of Facebook's Platform Partnerships team - Facebook's first partner engineer
Owner
2006 - 2010
Profitable importer, wholesaler, and retailer of business and consumer electronic items. Grew revenue to $630,000 with no full time employees. Used software and wrote software to automate processes. Built 4 brand names and exited via private sale to business partner.
Sales Engineer
2006 - 2007
- 2006 Google OC Award: Google Toolbar Distribution (Google's second highest honor) - Lead technical liaison on 35 deals for Google Toolbar distribution and ISP Syndication - Our team distributed hundreds of millions of Toolbars generating over over $1 Billion USD in deal value - Four of our deals were featured in the Wall Street Journal