Barrett Parkman
Managing Partner @ GWC Innovator Fund
Menlo Park, United States
Barrett Parkman is a seed investor at GWC Innovator Fund in Menlo Park focused on Information Technology and Artificial Intelligence. Barrett Parkman is Director of Startup and VC Ecosystem at Samsung Catalyst Fund, Samsung Electronics’ multi-stage venture capital fund focused on core technology areas including AI/deep learning, cloud infrastructure, smart machines (cars, robots, factories), IoT, digital health, and device-level technologies.Prior to Samsung, Barrett wasmanaging partner at the GWC Innovator Fund, an early-stage venture fund that made over 30 investments in data and AI startups in Silicon Valley, China, India, and Israel. He also founded a global startup program called G-Startup Worldwide, where he helped hundreds of startups raised billions of dollars in capital and some get acquired by Amazon, Google, Alibaba, Apple and others. In addition, Barrett co-founded the Global Mobile Internet Conference (GMIC), where he led marketing and content to grow the event to become one of the largest tech conferences in the world. Barrett graduated from the Tsinghua University (in collaboration with MIT Sloan) International MBA program in Beijing and has continued his executive education at Stanford GSB, Harvard Business School, and UC Berkeley. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Georgia.
- Total investments:
- 23
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 9%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Barrett Parkman invests in
Stages Barrett Parkman invests in
Countries Barrett Parkman invests in
Contacts
| Type | Contact | Validation |
|---|---|---|
| Work email | ||
| Personal email | ||
| Work phone | ||
| Personal phone | ||
| Socials |
Investment Focus
Industry
- Information Technology 6 (26%)
- Artificial Intelligence 6 (26%)
- Travel 5 (22%)
- E-Commerce 4 (17%)
- Apps 3 (13%)
Stage
- Seed 16 (70%)
- Pre-Seed 2 (9%)
- Series A 2 (9%)
- Angel 1 (4%)
- Venture - Series Unknown 1 (4%)
Country
- United States 12 (52%)
- Brazil 2 (9%)
- Israel 2 (9%)
- Hong Kong 2 (9%)
- United Kingdom 2 (9%)
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Taking care of everything from start to end: Experience + Host + Transportation. We match you with the best available local Host for your desired Experience. No booking in advance is needed! A "Hop" is a Personalized Experience that includes Host and Private Transportation | $400K / Pre-Seed / Mar 20, 2024 | ||
| Upaway is on-demand trip support from real travelers. They securely store travel-related documents, share and collaborate on them across trips and travel plans with a few taps, provide human trip support, and provide personalized safety updates across every destination. | $535K / Pre-Seed / Nov 22, 2022 | ||
| Founded in May 2016, BabyQuip is the world's leading baby gear rental service, delivering clean, quality baby gear items—from car seats to strollers and more—to families who don't want to haul bulky gear while traveling. BabyQuip Cleaning, offers exceptional cleaning services for baby gear for local families and businesses, particularlyfor car seats, strollers, and high chairs. BabyQuip has served over 125,000 families in the US, Canada and beyondAs a managed marketplace, the BabyQuip platform enables its community of over 1500 independent contractors, called Quality Providers, the opportunity to build a business renting and cleaning baby gear on the BabyQuip platform. Mostly moms, the Quality Providers benefit from an active and supportive community, ongoing training, and leads generated from both online advertising and through strategic partnerships. | $1.3M / Seed / Apr 19, 2018 | ||
| In early 2020 Edwin merged with Buddy.ai. The resulting company kept the name “Buddy.ai”. Headquartered in San Francisco, it focuses on building a virtual English conversation partner for over 500 million children around the globe who are trying to learn English, but can't reach fluency because they lack genuine practice speaking the language.The company doubled down on its mobile app Buddy, the voice-based English tutor for kids, organically combining solutions developed by Buddy.ai and Edwin.Edwin built an AI-powered service for learning English as a foreign language. It combines the latest adaptive learning and Natural Language Understanding technology with pedagogical content as well as on-demand human instructors to offer its students affordable, personalized, 1:1 learning. Based in San Francisco, the company was funded by General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Google Assistant Investments Program, and several other investors. Over 800 thousand students have improved their English with Edwin. | $1.5M / Seed / Mar 15, 2018 | ||
| Eva is the easiest way to send personalized corporate gifts at scale. Never worry about preferences or delivery details again. Just cc Eva in an email or chat on Slack.Eva's machine intelligence matches hip product companies with the unique interests and attributes of the gift recipient. The result is a perfect automated gift from acurated list of vendors. | $1.6M / Seed / Dec 01, 2017 | ||
| Scoutible is a game-based hiring platform, using immersive mobile games to pinpoint perfect-fit candidates for jobs. Scoutible’s patent-pending technology identifies players’ unique cognitive and personality traits through gameplay, then spots opportunities where players’ attributes match those of companies’ proven top performers. Play for free,learn your strengths, and get scouted. | $5M / Seed / Oct 25, 2017 | ||
| Speech AI technology development and advancement are the main goals of the AssemblyAI company. Building and scaling extremely accurate, user-friendly, and secure speech recognition models is the main focus of their work. These models are made to interpret and comprehend human speech, and thousands of users, top businesses, and developers around theworld are already making extensive use of their technology. The company aims to expand speech artificial intelligence by developing sophisticated models that will open up whole new kinds of voice data-based applications and goods. In essence, they are trying to democratize and innovate the potential of speech artificial intelligence for a variety of use cases and sectors. | $120K / Seed / Aug 23, 2017 | ||
| AROS brings cutting edge augmented reality, AR, to all outdoor industrial vectors. It augments the real world to revolutionise peoples day to day lives. This is done thanks to a portfolio of patents which enables the placement of virtual objects in a fast, stable and accurate way. The AROS platform mitigates all the developers’ challenges indeveloping their next outdoors AR hardware. From its unique UI and UX to its proprietary line-of-sight position and orientation algorithm, AROS offers a variety of advantages to the outdoor AR product developer. | Seed / Jun 01, 2017 | ||
| StockViews is an investment research platform. We have a singular focus on finding misplaced securities in the market using machine intelligence and high-performance investment analysts StockViews Ltd is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (Reference number: 763770) | $645.8K / Seed / May 16, 2017 | ||
| We are making the world a safer place with our personal safety application, Saferway. Saferway enables you to share real-time videos and location very easily with our unique pattern recognition. When you are in danger, just scream, blink your eyes, or click volume/power button several times. Then Saferway will be automatically started, withoutturning screen on or unlocking your phone. To inform your current situation exactly, the real-time videos and location will be shared until you press stop button. The videos will be encrypted, uploaded to your GDrive every 5 seconds, and shared only with family and friends you registered to protect your privacy. Your family and friends can check the previous video any time, not like video streaming service which depends on time and network connection. Also, each video is only 100~200kB that it can be uploaded in 1 second even with poor network connection. | Seed / Apr 01, 2017 | ||
| See all 23 investments → | |||
Co-Investors
About GWC Innovator Fund
Their newly launched GWC Innovator Fund is a venture fund focused exclusively on investing in global innovators that are improving the world. Some of their recent investments include 3D Robotics in the US, Goqii in India, DayDayUp in China and Qraved in Indonesia. G-Startup Worldwide (https://angel.co/g-startup-worldwide) is theirglobal startup competition held around the world to find the most innovative, early stage startups, invest $1,000,000 in them, support them with a global network and enable them to change the world.
GWC Innovator Fund Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
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Barrett Parkman
Managing Partner
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FAQ
What does Barrett Parkman invest in?
Barrett Parkman invests primarily in Information Technology, Artificial Intelligence and Travel startups, most often at Seed and Pre-Seed stage. Most of the 23 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
How do I contact Barrett Parkman?
Public channels for Barrett Parkman include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and the website linked on this profile. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
When did Barrett Parkman last invest?
The most recent investment recorded for Barrett Parkman closed in Mar 2024. Shizune tracks 23 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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