Entrepreneurial Ventures
David Walsh formed his first start up in the early 1980s while attending graduate school at NYU. David has founded seven technology companies over his 35-year career.
IXNET
IXnet was the first extranet to be built, connecting 2,000 of the world’s largest banks and their partners. The company was financed by IPC and taken public in 1999 on Nasdaq.
Initial Engagement: 1995
Investment Status: $3.4 billion gain; 60X return
Role: Founder, Chairman, President, CEO
IPC
IPC is the global market leader providing trading systems and other technologies and services to the financial markets.
Initial Engagement: 1998
Investment Status: Sold to Global Crossing along with IXnet for $3.65 billion.
Role: President, CEO
DefensX
DefensX, with its patent-pending unique threat isolation technologies, effectively protects users from the web and SaaS application content-borne threats who work from anywhere. The solution is cloud-native, delivered to the end-user through a single, lightweight browser extension or a mobile application. DefensX solution can onboard 100,000 users in less than 5 minutes, requires no additional hardware or software installations. It works on all devices including smartphones & tablets, on all operating systems, and supports all browsers and SaaS applications; and can reduce cybersecurity infrastructure costs of companies by at least 50%. Isoolate serves the SMBs, mid-tier, and Fortune 500 companies directly and/or through partnerships with marquee MSPs/MSSPs.
Initial Engagement: 2020
Investment Status: Active
Role: Chairman, Advisor
Pax8
Pax8 is the leader in cloud distribution. As a born in the cloud company, Pax8 empowers businesses to capitalize on the $1 trillion cloud opportunity and achieve more with cloud. Through billing, provisioning, automation, industry-leading PSA integrations, and pre-and-post sales support, Pax8 simplifies cloud buying, improves operational efficiency, and lowers customer acquisition cost. Pax8 is a proven, award-winning disruptor in the market, earning accolades like NexGen’s Best in Show two years in a row, Biggest Buzz at IT Nation, CRN’s Coolest Cloud Vendor, Best in Show at two consecutive XChange conferences, HTG’s Rookie of the Year, and more. If you want to be successful with cloud, you want to work with Pax8.
Initial Engagement: 2018
Investment Status: Active
Role: Board Member
Voyager Networks
Started in 1993 as a facilities-based international carrier operating out of 60 Hudson Street known as the gateway to the world, Voyager became a pioneer in the Web Hosting businesses in the US. The business saw Yahoo and SonyOnline as some of its first clients. The business merged with Global Center a similarly situated web-hosting business on the West Coast and was sold to Frontier Communications in 1998.
Initial Engagement: 1993
Investment Status: Merged with GlobalCenter and sold to Frontier Communications. 7X return, +100% IRR
Role: Co-Founder, Investor, Board Member
XChangePoint
XChangePoint is building a software defined networking consortium and optical peering network designed exclusively for the global financial industry, which has the most demanding requirements for networking performance, reliability and security, spending billions each year on traditional communications services. By optically peering the largest financial firms in the world XChangePoint will create a valuable network that all the largest carriers will want to peer with, while completely changing the economics of networking for all participants. The network is being rolled out in 2020 with the sponsorship of several large banks and other financial institutions, given a collective ownership and governance model as innovative as the network design itself.
Initial Engagement: 2019
Investment Status: Active
Role: Founder, Investor, Chairman
Peachscore
Peachscore is the world’s first scoring platform and fastest growing marketplace for start ups and investors. The company’s mission is to standardize communication between startups and investors and democratize data access to help entrepreneurs de-risk their businesses, get discovered and get funding. Much like FICO did with personal credit, Peachscore’s unique scoring system provides a new level of transparency to early stage businesses and allows entrepreneurs to better understand the strengths and weakness of their startup. Peachscore can not only be used to gain insights about a business but it allows entrepreneurs to showcase it to a large investor audience; effectively speeding up the due diligence process and time to funding.
Initial Engagement: 2020
Investment Status: Active
Role: Advisor
Kalibr8
Kalibr8 cloud optimization SaaS delivers automated and easy-to-use cloud-cost solutions to organizations through Managed Service Providers and Distributors. Kalibr8’s automated cloud optimization capabilities allow MSPs to manage their customer’s cloud resources easily. No coding, No scripting, No hassle.
Public Phone
The first company to be licensed in New York to provide Customer Owned Coin Operated Telephone Service, or COCOTS, PublicPhone sold and maintained payphone customers and operated its own route of payphones located throughout the tri-state area. Company was merged into Extranet.
Initial Engagement: 1985
Investment Status: Merged with Extranet
Role: Co-founder and Chairman
Newphotonics
Newphotonics is a fabless chip startup developing photonic-processors to solve the acute problem of hyper-scale data centers – the growth in energy consumption and inefficient capacity scalability.
By developing highly efficient, ‘All-Optic’ chips we upgrade the power-hungry and costly electronic chips found in every datacenter component and deliver never possible before –
1. End-to-end optical connectivity
2. Reduced power consumption
3. Exponential data rate growth
4. Lower cost of ownership
We are the future of datacenter technologies.