# Inspovation Ventures

> Inspovation Ventures is a VC fund in Los Altos backing Software and Internet. See 21 investments, check sizes, portfolio and contact details. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: VC Fund
- Location: Los Altos, United States
- Total investments: 21
- Last investment: Aug 2017
- Lead investor: 0%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inspovation-ventures/
- X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/Inspovation
- Website: http://www.inspovation.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/inspovation/

Inspovation Ventures is a VC fund in Los Altos focused on Software and Internet. Inspovation: That magic moment when inspiration collides with innovation to launch a new opportunity or define a new path. They are a group of senior executives who provide advice and angel funding in mobile, SaaS and cloud computing. The partners and affiliates at Inspovation have built many companies and had the good fortune of taking a fewpublic. Their fondest memories are the earliest days of a company when they truly thought that their innovation would change the world and the entire team functioned as a close-knit family. This is the stage at which they choose to partner with startups. In addition to investing, they like to “fill the gaps” and be the partners “on call” for entrepreneurs starting new companies. They act as advisors and leverage their collective network for initial customer acquisition, recruiting, fundraising and more.

## Contacts

5 contacts available for Inspovation Ventures. Shizune tracks 2 team members at Inspovation Ventures. Sign up free to unlock them: https://app.shizune.co/sign-up/investor-profiles/find-team-emails/inspovation-ventures?utm_source=investor_profile

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 7 | 33% |
| Internet | 6 | 29% |
| Mobile | 4 | 19% |
| Information Technology | 4 | 19% |
| Apps | 3 | 14% |

42 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 16 | 76% |
| Series A | 2 | 10% |
| Pre-Seed | 1 | 5% |

## Team

| Name | Title | Investments | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| David Auerbach | Founding Partner | 2 | — |
| Pavan Nigam | Founding Partner | 1 | — |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Slyce | Slyce is a marketing automation and analytics platform for brand ambassadors. Today, most brands manage the digital and social content requirements for the ambassadors with emails, text messages, Dropbox links, and Excel spreadsheets and have little data or insight into the activity and value of their brand ambassadors.Slyce provides streamlinedcontent management, workflow, and analytics tools to a variety of brands and organizations, allowing them to share social posts through brand ambassadors or source ambassador generated content for the brand's use. Slyce was launched by Bryant Barr, Jim Cai, and Stephen Curry in July 2015. | $700K | Seed | Aug 25, 2017 |  |
| atSpoke | atSpoke helps everyone work smart and fast with modern, seamless internal ticketing. Employees get immediate, convenient, and personalized access to internal knowledge and support. IT, HR, and Support teams deliver high quality service and maintain accountability while easily scaling to meet demands. | $8M | Series A | Aug 30, 2016 |  |
| Fortanix | Fortanix is building a new security category with its Runtime Encryption(R) technology using Intel SGX. Just like encryption today protects data at rest and data during motion, Runtime Encryption(R) keeps keys, data, and applications completely protected even when infrastructure has been compromised and even root users are malicious.Fortanix's Self-Defending Key Management Service (SDKMS) is a next-generation cloud native solution for your enterprise encryption needs. It offers key generation, management, distribution, encryption-as-a-service, HSM, KMIP, and tokenization all rolled-in as a single product the highest possible level of security and cloud scale. Available as both FIPS certified appliance and a globally available SaaS (with Equinix's strong SLA), SDKMS offers incredible simple central management, server-side load balancing, central tamper-proof logging, RESTful APIs, and Runtime Encryption(R) plugin to run custom code.Fortanix's Runtime Encryption(R) Platform allows customers to bring any docker container and run them securely inside Intel SGX without any modification. It allows customers to share data with each other without losing control of the data, run analytics on sensitive data, run applications securely in remote cloud, move PII-heavy sensitive data to public cloud, etc. Fortanix's Enclave Development Platform (EDP) allows customers to write Rust code to run natively as SGX enclaves. Supported by mainline Rust compiler, developers find EDP as the easiest and the most secure way of developing new applications.In the short time, Fortanix has developed strategic partnership with Equinix and IBM cloud and counts multiple F50 companies as its customers. Fortanix is a Gartner Cool Vendor and also was runner up in RSA Innovation Sandbox among 500+ security companies where judges called it "holy grail of security". Fortanix has more than ten patents pending for its innovation. |  | Seed | Jul 28, 2016 |  |
| StackShare | StackShare is a community that helps developers and engineers discover and compare software tools. Our vision is to transform how SaaS tools and infrastructure are bought and sold.Choosing SaaS and cloud infrastructure tools is difficult. If you’re a developer looking for a hosting solution, you have hundreds of options and no clear way to siftthrough them all. We’ve built a community of developers, engineers, CTOs, and VPEs that recommend, review, and share their technology stacks. They have significant buying power and a need for tooling and infrastructure services, from startups to large enterprises. The options they have are confusing and increasing in number by the day - they’re desperate to get help choosing the right solutions. StackShare lets technologists see all the best tools and services, who are using them, and why. | $1.5M | Seed | Jun 04, 2016 |  |
| Paysa | Paysa is a firm that has a personalized & up-to-date compensation transparency source that helps employees understand their market compensation and help achieve it in the labor market. | $4M | Seed | Feb 24, 2016 |  |
| Aporeto | Aporeto offers comprehensive cloud-native security for containers and microservices. It secures all workloads across any infrastructure with identity-based access control for a Zero Trust posture. Aporeto was founded in 2016 and is based in San Jose, California. | $3.3M | Seed | Dec 30, 2015 |  |
| Next Force Technology | Next Force Technology is building an on-demand service for businesses, focused on a large and critical area that is untapped. It was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. |  | Seed | Jun 12, 2015 |  |
| Next Force Technology | Next Force Technology is building an on-demand service for businesses, focused on a large and critical area that is untapped. It was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. |  | Seed | Jun 12, 2015 |  |
| Haystack News | Haystack TV is the leading OTT news service featuring video news content from 150+ content partners including Bloomberg, AP, CBS, Hearst, and TV stations nationwide. Haystack TV is consistently the top-rated news service on connected TV platforms such as Apple TV, Roku, and Android TV. Google selected Haystack TV as the “Best TV Experience” for the2017 Google Play Awards together with Netflix and RedBull TV. | $1.7M | Seed | Apr 07, 2015 |  |
| Cassette | Cassette is the best way to record, transcribe & search important conversations like user interviews, meetings, lectures and video calls. | $1.2M | Seed | Feb 27, 2015 |  |

10 of 21 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Andreessen Horowitz](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/andreessen-horowitz) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [BluePointe Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/bluepoint-ventures) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [New Enterprise Associates](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/new-enterprise-associates) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Start Fund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/start-fund) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [AME Cloud Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/ame-cloud-ventures) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Red Dog Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/red-dog-capital) — VC Fund, 2 deals together

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- [Right Side Capital Management](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/right-side-capital-management) — VC Fund

## FAQ

### What does Inspovation Ventures invest in?

Inspovation Ventures invests primarily in Software, Internet and Mobile startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 21 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 Inspovation Ventures?

Public channels for Inspovation Ventures 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.

### Who are the partners at Inspovation Ventures?

The team at Inspovation Ventures includes David Auerbach (Founding Partner) and Pavan Nigam (Founding Partner). The Team section lists each member with their title, investment count and links.

### 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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