Questrom School of Business, Boston University

Director, National Grid Partners

Boston, Massachusetts, United States

National Grid Partners, the corporate venture and innovation arm of National Grid was announce Nov/2018,  National Grid Partners is based in Los Gatos/CA, and invests in technologies that are driving the future of energy and utilities world-wide.

National Grid Partners

Copper enables targeted customer engagement for energy companies through advanced residential load disaggregation and behavioral energy efficiency software.

Copper Labs

Member of the Board Of Directors

Omnidian’s unique collaboration between solar experts, software engineers, and data scientists across over 1,500 Megawatts of commercial and residential solar power assets has resulted in significant advances in monitoring, diagnostics and remediation of solar assets, driving unprecedented insights and significant operational efficiencies.

Omnidian

Board Observer

LineVision provides industry leading, non-invasive solutions that monitor the condition and behavior of high-voltage transmission lines, and can significantly improve line throughput, helping ensure optimal, safe, and reliable operation.

LineVision

Investor, Board Observer

Urbint ushers in a new age of solutions by building a model of the changing world, training AI to anticipate future risk, and helping utilities execute the right intervention at the right time.  Urbint helps utilities better manage risk and allocate resources through predictive Artificial Intelligence (AI) innovation. It accomplishes this by applying AI to public and private data sets to help infrastructure operators predict safety incidents, and therefore reduce risk by more efficiently deploying resources to the right place at the right time. What differentiates Urbint is its model: it takes historical incident data such as third-party damage, leaks, customer odor calls, and workplace accidents; combines it with internal data such as the age, type and location of the asset involved and external data such as weather, soil conditions, traffic patterns, and urban density (called Urbint’s Model of the World); and then applies advanced machine learning to predict future incident occurrences.

Urbint

Investor

ClimaCell uses non-traditional data sources and advanced data analytics to produce hyper-accurate weather forecasts, and is on a mission to map all of the weather data in the world.  NOAA estimates that  1% to 3% of US GDP is weather-dependent.  ClimaCell is delivering products that improve local weather predictions across numerous verticals and geographies.  Great team, great products, great company!

Tomorrow.io (formerly ClimaCell)

Mr. Walsh joined National Grid in 2018 to focus on investments in emerging technology that will shape the future of energy.  Prior to National Grid, Mr. Walsh invested at Intel Capital in software and related technology companies.  Before moving to venture investing, Mr. Walsh worked in technical sales, product marketing, and software/hardware development.  Mr. Walsh graduated from Oregon State University with a BS in Computer Science; and from Boston University with an MBA in Finance.

Investment Director, National Grid Corporate Development

Streaming and virtual reality have revolutionized gaming, and they belong together. With VREAL, you can stream VR the way it’s meant to be seen for viewers with VR headsets, without excluding your traditional 2D audience. Easily record, replay, and share experiences using in-platform tools, stay engaged with chat from within the game, and hang out with your friends in virtual space!

If you’re interested in integrating VREAL with your game, email <a href="mailto:DevRel@vreal.net">DevRel@vreal.net</a>.

VREAL

Filament builds hardware and software for the Industrial Internet, allowing companies to securely connect and monitor their assets through long-range wireless networks. Encrypting down to the hardware level and leveraging Blockchain technology, Filament's decentralized network stack allows any device to connect, interact, and transact value independent of a central authority.

Filament!

Investor, Member of the Board of Directors

InContext Solutions provides virtual reality solutions for the retail market. ShopperMX, InContext’s enterprise SaaS platform allows companies to seamlessly ideate, evaluate and activate any retail concept from product and merchandising, to store layouts and design through virtual simulations. As a collaboration and analytics platform for the retail industry, ShopperMX harnesses the power of VR to significantly reduce operational costs, mitigate investment risk of new ideas and accelerate speed to market.

InContext Solutions

Investor, Member of the Board of Directors, Chairman of the Board

Yottaa’s mission is to help online businesses close the experience gap with an intelligent SaaS platform that manages, controls, and optimizes end-user experiences anywhere and on any device.

Today, businesses still struggle to provide optimal digital experiences thanks to the continuing rise in complexity of apps and the requirement to deliver them to smaller and slower devices. As a result, end users’ expectations for online experiences now far outstrip the reality of what is delivered to them. We call this discrepancy the “experience gap.”

Nearly every company doing business online sees an experience gap, and one by one we’re helping them close it. Optimize web and mobile apps to maximize user experience with Yottaa.

Yottaa

Investor, Board Observer, Member of the Board of Directors

ElasticBox powers agile application delivery on public and private clouds so businesses can innovate faster. By empowering developers to be more productive and providing control to IT Ops, customers like Netflix, DeNA and Cytobank use ElasticBox to accelerate their application lifecycles by 5-10x.  In June, 2016 CenturyLink announced acquisition of Elastic Box to enhance CenturyLink's ability to deliver end-to-end network, multi-cloud and hybrid IT services to business customers globally.  Congratulations to CEO Carol Carpenter and the team at Elastic Box.

ElasticBox

Thousands of organizations trust Apperian to securely deliver critical mobile apps to users — including BYOD, contracted workers, and unmanaged devices.  Apperian has been acquired by Arxan and will continue to secure mobile applications as part of Arxan's suite of offerings in this market.  Congratulations to Brian Day and Mark Lorion for their dedication and hard work in reaching this milestone.

<a href="http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2017/01/11/arxan-acquires-apperian-mobile-app-management-startup/">http://bostinno.streetwise.co/2017/01/11/arxan-acquires-apperian-mobile-app-management-startup/</a>

Apperian, Inc.

Prism is a leader in helping users understand and make sense of physical spaces via video.
Prisms cloud service transforms any video camera into a business intelligence tool that can be accessed from any device. Retailers large and small, as well as other customers, use Prism’s platform to remotely audit, manage, and optimize their real-world businesses.  CEO Steve Russell is delivering a powerful capability with the Prism team that helps users understand space usage and traffic flow, and monitor physical locations automatically.  Great Technology, Great Team.

Prism Skylabs

Swrve is a leader in mobile-first marketing.  Swrve provides a scalable cloud service for integrated marketing, A/B testing and optimization of content for mobile apps.  Chris Dean, CEO, and founders Hugh Reynolds and Steve Collins are building a core capability for mobile marketing and bringing a powerful platform online for mobile ap developers.   Great Team, Great Product.

Swrve

iStreamPlanet is a leader in streaming broadcast video over the internet and has streamed the largest broadcast events in the world including the Olympics, the SuperBowl, and World Cup Soccer.  iStreamPlanet provides Aventus, a cloud-based live streaming service for broadcast-quality video in an on-demand and turn-key fashion, allowing better resource management and flexible provisioning for broadcasters.

Turner Broadcasting acquired a majority interest in iStreamPlanet in August 2015 - news release is here: <a href="http://www.istreamplanet.com/blog-updates/turner-strikes-deal-for-istreamplanet/">http://www.istreamplanet.com/blog-updates/turner-strikes-deal-for-istreamplanet/</a>.

Congratulations to the iStreamPlanet team, lead by CEO Mio Babic, for delivering on the vision of cloud-based live video, and helping to shape the future of OTT live broadcasting.

Where did they go from here?  For more on iStreamPlanet and their successes with NBC in making Olympic History, see these 2016 updates on the Rio Games and some background on Vancouver, London, and Sochi efforts by iStreamPlanet and NBC:

<a href="http://www.istreamplanet.com/rio-2016/olympic-reflections-part-deux-from-sochi-to-rio-whats-changed/">http://www.istreamplanet.com/rio-2016/olympic-reflections-part-deux-from-sochi-to-rio-whats-changed/</a>;

iStreamPlanet Co.

Gaikai is a leader in Cloud Gaming and video streaming technology and was acquired by SONY in July, 2012.  Today Gaikai is the power behind SONY's Playstation Network, delivering increasing capability to PS4 console owners and driving SONY's PSN services business.  Awesome Team, Great Vision - An honor to have worked with them.  Congratulations to David Perry, Andrew Gault, Rui Pereira, and the Gaikai Team.  An exceptional company and a fantastic exit.

Gaikai

In April/2015 the REvolution team officially joined Microsoft and is now bringing the power of R to Microsoft's cloud and analytics offerings.  Congratulations to David Rich for leading this team to growth and a successful exit, and to the founding team of Martin Shultz and Richard Shultz for seeing the future of R in big data and analytics back in 2007.  I am honored to have worked with these leaders and their teams from inception to exit.

Revolution Analytics

In December/2017, Synopsys completed their acquisition of Black Duck Software.  It has been an honor and an education to work with this great team over the past 10 years,  Congratulations to the Black Duck team - past and present; particularly Doug Levin, Tim Yeaton, and Lou Shipley; who each led Black Duck to new levels, and made exceptional contributions to the company during their tenures.  Great product, team, and outcome.

For over a decade Black Duck Software has been the "go to"​ partner for enterprises that use open source software in their products.  Black Duck's services are used in most technology M&A involving software assets, and help ensure proper governance and license compliance as enterprises make increasing use of open source.  Black Duck's developer-focused products help developers discover open source software and comply with all license requirements when they bring open source software into their projects.  Black Duck's A-list customers include most companies that have software in their products.  As connected mobile and internet-of-things (IOT) devices proliferate, the use of open source software components in numerous devices that today have very little software will become the norm and Black Duck will be there to help.

Black Duck Software

Likewise is a leader in open source storage and identity management software with enterprise-ready open source offerings to allow Linux to interoperate with Windows in active-directory managed environments.  Likewise became part of EMC's Isilon group in March of 2012.  Congratulations to CEO Barry Crist (now at Chef) for leading this team to a successful outcome - Great Leader, Great Team.

Likewise Software

As a Director at Intel Capital, Mr. Walsh is interested in companies delivering new architectures for edge computing and hybrid cloud that scale globally and securely to provide services for the emerging internet of things;  companies working with open source software and open data formats to drive increased economic value; companies focused on delivering real-time immersive VR/AR/MR/XR experiences at the convergence of gaming, entertainment, simulation and visualization; and companies that are driving deeper understanding of complex behaviors through high-performance analytics, machine learning (ML/DL), and artificial intelligence (AI).  The synthesis of open source, big-data/analytics, deep-learning/AI, and advanced visualization/VR/AR scaled globally across secure devices and services, is transforming users experience and expectations of computing.

Intel Capital

Investor, Investment Manager, Investment Director

Working with numerous ISV's to help them take advantage of Intel's products and services has taken Mr. Walsh from Portland, Oregon to Redmond, Washington, and then to Boston, Massachusetts.  With a focus on Multimedia, High Performance Computing, Workstations, and Open Source; Mr Walsh has helped align technology and sales initiatives across Intel and ISV organizations to maximize benefits for both parties.  Some of the ISV's Mr. Walsh has worked with include Microsoft, Lotus, SoftKey, The Learning Company, Red Storm Entertainment, Fenris Wolf, PureSpeech, Lernout&Hauspie, Voice Control Systems, Dragon Systems, AVID Technology, SoftImage, PTC, Solidworks, Moldflow, ANSYS, HK&S (aka Abaqus), and Fluent (CFD, acquired by ANSYS).   As Open Source businesses began to have success selling into the enterprise, Mr. Walsh shifted focus to work more closely with JBoss, MySQL, and other open source enterprises to drive new opportunities for Intel and these emerging businesses.  The successful exits of JBoss (to Redhat) and MySQL (to SUN, then Oracle) were instrumental in causing Mr. Walsh to look at software businesses from the perspective of an Investor as well as a Partner, and influenced Mr. Walsh's subsequent decision to move to Intel Capital as an Investment Director.

Mr. Walsh worked on device drivers, X-Windows servers and firmware for various graphics boards for UNIX 5.4; subsequently leading Intel's first project to integrate a linear frame buffer into the PC architecture, for which Mr. Walsh was awarded the Intel Achievement Award in April 1992 by then-Intel CEO Andrew (Andy) Grove for "Changing the Industry's Perception of PC Graphics".

Patrick Walsh

Patrick Walsh