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
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
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