Todd Stavish joined SRI Ventures, the corporate venturing arm of US-based non-profit research institute SRI International, as managing director in September 2020. Stavish reported to Manish Kothari, the unit’s president, until the latter’s departure in February 2022.
SRI Ventures invests in ideas that create “world-changing enterprises that make people safer, healthier and more productive”. As well as providing capital, the unit also contributes advanced intellectual property and transfers technology to entrepreneurs.
The unit has invested in a wide range of deep technology startups, achieving a number of notable exits: these include Siri, the voice-recognition service acquired by Apple in 2010, and smart-calendar app Tempo, which was bought by Salesforce in 2015.
Among SRI Ventures’ current portfolio companies are additive manufacturing specialist Averatek, artificial intelligence (AI)-based neural network developer Latent AI, visual AI platform Passio and Vitrina, a platform which tracks global film and television production deals.
Prior to joining SRI, Stavish was Director of Lab41, a division of In-Q-Tel Labs. Under his leadership, Lab41 developed novel deep learning algorithms, security for machine learning models, and one of the largest real-world audio training datasets.
He was previously co-founder of CosmiQ Works, an applied research lab focused on developing, prototyping, and evaluating open source artificial intelligence capabilities for geospatial use cases. Prior to that, Stavish led In-Q-Tel’s big data, geospatial, and commercial space investments.
Much of his early career was spent working in Silicon Valley start-ups. Stavish has a bachelor’s degree in computational physics from Saint Bonaventure University in New York State.
