MaC Ventures, original idea of ​​Adrian Fenty and Marlon Nichols, discreetly realizes its first investments – TechCrunch



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MaC Ventures, the new Los Angeles-based investment company formed from the merger of Cross Culture Ventures and M Ventures, has quietly started deploying capital from its fund.

Edge Delta is one of the first announced investments of the company. Indeed, he announced a first round of $ 3 million earlier this week.

The Seattle-based company, which has a tool for predicting and identifying faulty code and potential security issues in software designed for mobile environments, reflects the new focus on businesses reflecting changing environments in the commercial, cultural and technological worlds.

And if anyone knows anything about downtime and application failures, it's the two co-founders who have held positions at Microsoft, Twitter and Sumo Logic. This is the background Ozan Unlu, former Microsoft and Sumo Logic, and Fatih Yildiz, who has spent years at Twitter and Microsoft, will benefit from their services.

"We have reached the point of inflection in centralized security badysis. SIEM products such as Splunk are struggling to adapt and the lack of mature SaaS solutions means that if customers want to keep up with the growth of their environments, we need to innovate, "said Will Peteroy, founder and director General of ICEBRG (acquired in 2018) and Director of Technology for Security at Gigamon, in a statement.

This innovation is something that M Ventures and Cross Culture have tried to identify according to the previous statements of the two founders. And the merger between the two companies was probably about growth and scale. The two companies have co-invested in a number of deals and share the same focus on cultural changes that create new opportunities.

Blavity, BlocPower and Mayvenn are among the companies with shared portfolios between the two companies. They each reflect a different aspect of the company's commitment to the transformations that have affected culture and the community in the 21st century.

BlocPower focuses on urban resilience and health in the face of new challenges in the electricity grid; Blavity has become the online community of creativity and black news. and Mayvenn leverages the community's economy to create new entrepreneurs and start new businesses.

For Adrian Fenty and Marlon Nichols – the two general partners of the new fund – and the general partners Charles King and Michael Palank and the partner Alyson DeNardo, MaC Ventures is a logical progression in their progress in the venture capital sector.

Fenty, former mayor of Washington and first special advisor to Andreessen Horowitz Seven years ago, he's long been interested in the intersection of technology and governance and said the policy was an excellent introduction to the business world in an interview with TechCrunch when he joined Andreessen:

"As a mayor, you work in many neighborhoods and every day is different," Fenty said, noting that the same could be said for VCs working with different startups. However, the pace will probably be a little faster in this space than in the political domain. "I believe that change should happen quickly and dramatically, and that this is the technology industry," he said. "Some of these entrepreneurs and CEOs have contagious energy and their ability to come up with new ideas."

Regarding Nichols, the venture capital initiation was done through work at Intel Capital before hitting with Troy Carter, a sponsor of the MaC Ventures fund, to form Cross Culture.

As the new business finds its legs, it is likely that some of Nichols' guiding principles of Cross Culture will be included in the new vehicle.

"It's time to be here," Nichols said in an interview earlier this year. "If you plan to invest in tomorrow's businesses, you have to go where the world is changing – and it's black and brown, honestly."

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