Headquarters: Austin, Texas
Description: LiveOak Venture Partners is an Austin-based, early-stage venture capital firm that partners with visionary entrepreneurs who use disruptive technologies and business models to challenge the status quo. While many of their investments begin at the seed stage, LiveOak is a full life-cycle investor focused on technology and technology-driven service companies primary based in Texas and the Southwest. For over a decade, the Founders of LiveOak have helped entrepreneurs create industry-leading companies.
“LiveOak partners with visionary entrepreneurs who use disruptive technologies and business models to challenge the status quo.”
Recent Investments:
- Ranzure Networks $13M / Series A (Lead)
- CS Disco $18.58M / Series C
- Data.world $14M / Series A
- NSS Labs $16M / Series C
Website: liveoakvp.com
Venu Shamapant is a co-founder of LiveOak Venture Partners and has been investing in early stage Texas based companies and entrepreneurs since 1999. 
Prior to founding LiveOak, Venu was a General Partner at Austin Ventures where he invested in companies producing more than $1.5B in enterprise values to date. He was an early investor in and sat on the Board of Directors of LifeSize Communications (acquired by Logitech), Spatial Wireless (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), Navini Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems), Mavenir Systems (NYSE:MVNR) and Sipera Systems (acquired by Avaya Communications).
Prior to joining Austin Ventures, he was with McKinsey & Co. serving clients in the enterprise systems and software markets. He started his professional career as a software developer and engineering lead at Mentor Graphics.