Amit Garg (pictured) and Sanjay Rao have launched a venture capital firm having met while working for Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), the VC firm funded by financial services firm Wells Fargo.
Tau Ventures – the name was drawn from a Greek letter equal to 2 times pi and considered a better representation of a circle – invests between $250,000 and $750,000 per deal, in US and Canada-based startups that are nine to 18 months away from product-market fit.
Garg said in a blog post: “We are operators/entrepreneurs turned investors and believe in working closely with founders at an early-stage.”
He added by email: “We are launching a $10-15m applied AI fund and engaging with prospective LPs. We [did] a first close in August 2019, and a final close around end of the year.”
Tau Ventures’ first deals include Blendid, the developer of a robotic food-preparation arm; RubiconMD, a referral service for primary care physicians; and Elemental Machines, which uses internet-of-things technology to improve production of foods and pharmaceuticals.
The firm’s other portfolio companies are Totient, which is working on monoclonal antibodies to treat cancer; OneHealth Company, which is examining canine cancers; robotics monitoring technology developer Freedom Robotics and Biotia, which is analysing the genomics of pathogens.
After meeting Rao at NVP, Garg spent five years at consumer electronics manufacturer Samsung’s Next unit and co-founded a startup, HealthIQ, which has raised $120m in venture capital and which was last valued at $450m.
Garg’s investments at Samsung included UniKey, NuTonomy, BioBeats, Glooko, Cohero Health, Terapede, Figure1, HealthifyMe, Healthy.io and RapidDeploy.
Rao had left NVP at the end of 2013 and subsequently spent more than four years as a director at Accelerate Labs, an artificial intelligence research lab and software studio based in San Francisco.
Photo of Amit Garg courtesy of LinkedIn.
