About Sam
Sam joined Sapphire as a member of the Ventures investment team in 2020. In addition to sourcing and evaluating new investments, he is also responsible for ESG activities across all of Sapphire’s investment strategies including helping our portfolio companies and partner funds navigate ESG challenges and opportunities. He is involved in Sapphire’s investments in Medable, OwnBackup, Verbit, Yugabyte, Privacera, and Braze.
Prior to Sapphire, Sam worked at Qatalyst Partners in San Francisco, working on several technology M&A transactions across software, consumer Internet, and semiconductors. Sam graduated with distinction from Amherst College with a Bachelor of Arts in computer science and history, and was a co-captain of the varsity golf team. As a Boston area native, moving to the West Coast has fostered Sam’s passion for the outdoors, primarily skiing, mountain biking and playing golf in his free time.
investments
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Medable is on a mission to get effective therapies to patients faster by transforming clinical drug development with disruptive technologies. The company’s digital platform streamlines design, recruitment, retention and data quality for decentralized trials, replacing siloed systems.
CEO: Dr. Michelle Longmire
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OwnBackup, the leading cloud-to-cloud backup and restore platform, provides secure, automated, daily backups of SaaS and PaaS data, as well as sophisticated data compare and restore tools for disaster recovery.
CEO: Sam Gutmann
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Verbit is a leading interactive transcription and captioning solution. Verbit’s in-house, AI-based technology is able to transform both live and recorded video and audio into 99% accurate captions and transcripts for the higher education, legal, media and enterprise industries.
CEO: Tom Livne
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Founded by former Facebook and Oracle engineers, Yugabyte is the company behind YugabyteDB, the open source, high-performance distributed SQL database for building global, cloud-native applications.
CEO: Bill Cook
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Privacera’s SaaS-based data security and governance platform enables analytics teams to access data without compromising compliance with regulations such as GDPR, CCPA, LGPD, and HIPAA. Privacera provides a single pane of glass for securing sensitive data across multiple cloud services.
CEO: Balaji Ganesan
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Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform that powers relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. The company went public in 2021.
NASDAQ: BRZEIPO 2021
News + Perspective
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The Database of the Future: Why We’re Excited to Lead Yugabyte’s Series C
Thought Leadership Investment / October 28, 2021The Database of the Future: Why We’re Excited to Lead Yugabyte’s Series C
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Decarbonizing the Future: Why Sapphire is Excited about B2B Software Powering the Transition
Thought Leadership / October 7, 2021Decarbonizing the Future: Why Sapphire is Excited about B2B Software Powering the Transition
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Simplifying Transcription and Captioning with AI: Why Sapphire is Thrilled to Once Again Back Verbit
Investment / June 8, 2021Simplifying Transcription and Captioning with AI: Why Sapphire is Thrilled to Once Again Back Verbit