# Erik Straser

> Erik Straser is a Series C investor at ClearSky backing Software and Information Technology. See 12 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [ClearSky](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/clear-sky)
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 12
- Last investment: Nov 2021
- Lead investor: 25%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/erikstraser

Erik Straser is a Series C investor at ClearSky in San Francisco focused on Software and Information Technology. Erik is a Managing Director at ClearSky, a VC/growth equity firm. With over 20 years of venture experience, Erik focuses on software and internet services companies. Prior to ClearSky, Erik was an entrepreneur-in-residence with General Electric and an active seed stage investor. In 1998, Erik joined Mohr Davidow Ventures and left the firmin 2013 as a General Parter. While a student at Stanford, Erik worked at Interval Research Corp., a technology incubator funded by Paul Allen, and at Los Alamos National Laboratory as a technical staff member. He is a winner of the 2006 World Technology Award for Finance, presented by the World Technology Network, in association with the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), Dow Chemical, Cisco, TIME magazine, Fortune magazine, Science magazine/AAAS, Red Herring, and CNN.Erik earned a bachelor's degree in engineering from Harvey Mudd College and both doctoral and master's degrees from the Stanford University School of Engineering.

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 4 | 33% |
| Information Technology | 2 | 17% |
| News | 1 | 8% |
| SaaS | 1 | 8% |
| Solar | 1 | 8% |

21 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Series C | 4 | 33% |
| Series A | 2 | 17% |
| Series B | 2 | 17% |
| Series D | 1 | 8% |
| Funding Round | 1 | 8% |

6 stages tracked in total.

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Bluelava | Blue Lava is the leading cybersecurity program management solution enabling enterprise security and IT teams to effectively strategize, prioritize, and budget core cybersecurity programs. It enables visibility into the full enterprise IT infrastructure - highlighting and quantifying the strengths and weaknesses of supporting technology, people, andprocesses and provides for what-if scenario modeling and risk analysis. In addition, Blue Lava delivers these results quickly and easily without the need for expansive professional service engagements and enables CISOs/CIOs to communicate them with confidence to the board or other executives using a standard NIST CF format or Blue Lava's own rich CMM format. Blue Lava is the fastest way to build a high-performance cybersecurity program. | $7.5M | Series A | Nov 30, 2021 |  |
| Diamanti | Diamanti is the technology leader in bare-metal container infrastructure. Purpose-built for modern cloud and open-source environments, Diamanti’s container platform gives infrastructure architects, IT operations, and application owners the speed, simplicity, efficiency, and control they need to run stateful containerized applications in production. | $35M | Series C | Nov 07, 2019 |  |
| Bluelava | Blue Lava is the leading cybersecurity program management solution enabling enterprise security and IT teams to effectively strategize, prioritize, and budget core cybersecurity programs. It enables visibility into the full enterprise IT infrastructure - highlighting and quantifying the strengths and weaknesses of supporting technology, people, andprocesses and provides for what-if scenario modeling and risk analysis. In addition, Blue Lava delivers these results quickly and easily without the need for expansive professional service engagements and enables CISOs/CIOs to communicate them with confidence to the board or other executives using a standard NIST CF format or Blue Lava's own rich CMM format. Blue Lava is the fastest way to build a high-performance cybersecurity program. | $17.5M | Series A | Jun 07, 2019 |  |
| Nanosolar | Nanosolar prints solar cells and assembles panels to enable the most cost-efficient solar electricity. Nanosolars proprietary approach to printing CIGS (Copper, Indium, Gallium, Selenium) and nanoparticle inks using an annealing process minimizes the use of expensive, high vacuum deposition manufacturing equipment. This allows the Company toutilize equipment from the industrial printing and roll-to-roll manufacturing industries to produce solar-electric foil at high speeds, bringing the economics of printing to the world of solar PV semiconductor manufacturing. | $70M | Private Equity | Jun 01, 2012 |  |
| SodaHead | SodaHead Inc., provides best in class polling technology for world class media companies including ESPN, ABC News, Good Morning America, LA Times and Warner Brothers Television. SodaHead's media partner offerings include polling content management systems and analytics, broadcast to mobile polling integration and social polling initiatives,among others. | $8.4M | Series B | Jun 25, 2008 |  |
| Cenzic | Cenzic provides application security testing for enterprise software to Software as a Service, going beyond signature-based tools to automatically find application vulnerabilities. | $10M | Series D | Mar 24, 2008 |  |
| SodaHead | SodaHead Inc., provides best in class polling technology for world class media companies including ESPN, ABC News, Good Morning America, LA Times and Warner Brothers Television. SodaHead's media partner offerings include polling content management systems and analytics, broadcast to mobile polling integration and social polling initiatives,among others. | $4.3M | Series A | Jan 01, 2007 |  |
| Movaris | Movaris, Inc. offers solutions to integrate and manage financial close and other governance, risk, and compliance processes. The company's Movaris Unity application suite includes Enterprise Risk Manager that allows corporations to document and manage identified risk in the organization; GRC for use in the enterprise to address compliance,risk, and performance management initiatives; Account Reconciliation, which enables financial organizations to track and review account reconciliation tasks during the financial close process; Sarbanes-Oxley Compliance that manages various SOX activities by documenting various controls, testing, and remediation, as well as assigns tasks to individuals and delivers audit trails; and Financial Close, which enables financial organizations to track and review financial close tasks during the auditing and reporting processes. It also provides OneClose e-Binder that creates a system of record for various close, reconciliation, and compliance activities, as well as enables management and auditors to retrieve various documents to reconstruct a financial period; and OneClose Platform, which assigns tasks to performers and reviewers, as well as integrates account reconciliations with SOX compliance testing and financial close activities. In addition, the company offers implementation, training, and on-going support services. It serves financial services, insurance, manufacturing, technology, consumer goods, retail and distribution, media, energy, transportation, health, and medical industries. The company was formerly known as Paper2net and changed its name to Movaris, Inc. in 2001. Movaris, Inc. was founded in 1998 and is based in San Jose, California. As of February 14, 2008, Movaris, Inc. operates as a subsidiary of Trintech Group plc. | $6M | Series C | Aug 15, 2006 |  |
| Nanosolar | Nanosolar prints solar cells and assembles panels to enable the most cost-efficient solar electricity. Nanosolars proprietary approach to printing CIGS (Copper, Indium, Gallium, Selenium) and nanoparticle inks using an annealing process minimizes the use of expensive, high vacuum deposition manufacturing equipment. This allows the Company toutilize equipment from the industrial printing and roll-to-roll manufacturing industries to produce solar-electric foil at high speeds, bringing the economics of printing to the world of solar PV semiconductor manufacturing. | $75M | Series C | Jun 21, 2006 |  |
| Cenzic | Cenzic provides application security testing for enterprise software to Software as a Service, going beyond signature-based tools to automatically find application vulnerabilities. | $15M | Series C | Jul 11, 2005 |  |

10 of 12 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Redpoint](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/redpoint-ventures) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Advanced Technology Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/advanced-technology-ventures) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Cliffs](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/cliffs) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Crosslink Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/crosslink-capital) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [CRV](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/crvvc) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Armilar Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/espirito-santo-ventures) — VC Fund, 1 deal together

## About ClearSky

VC Fund · North Palm Beach, United States

ClearSky is a venture capital/growth equity group that invests in innovative companies, with a special focus on (i) technologies driving the energy transition, climate related technologies, and sustainability, (ii) the digital transformation of enterprise customers’ operations and communications, and (iii) disruptive solutions forcybersecurity, industrial security, and critical infrastructure security.

5 contacts available at ClearSky.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Alexander Weiss | CEO, Co-Founder & Managing Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alex-weiss |
| Austin Summers | Investment Professional | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/austin-summers |
| Bernard Noble | Managing Director | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bernard-noble |
| Bob Rauch | Managing Director | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bob-rauch |
| Erik Straser | Managing Director | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/erik-straser |

## Similar investors

### Similar stage
- [Sequoia Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/sequoia-capital) — VC Fund
- [New Enterprise Associates](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/new-enterprise-associates) — VC Fund
- [Bessemer Venture Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bessemer-venture-partners) — VC Fund

## FAQ

### What does Erik Straser invest in?

Erik Straser invests primarily in Software, Information Technology and News startups, most often at Series C and Series A stage. Most of the 12 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### When did Erik Straser last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Erik Straser closed in Nov 2021. Shizune tracks 12 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 Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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