LDV Capital Raises $10M Second Seed Fund for Visual Technologies

Evan Nisselson, General Parter & Founder of LDV Capital © Ron Haviv

We are very excited to announce the close of our second fund for investing in people building visual technology businesses at the pre-seed or seed stage. You can read more about it on the Wall Street Journal. Our press release is below.

Press Release -- LDV Capital, the venture fund investing in people building visual technology businesses, today announced a new $10M seed fund. It is the second fund for the thesis-driven firm that specifically invests in deep technical teams that leverage computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data.

Investors in this second fund include top technical experts in the field including Mike Krieger, Instagram Co-founder/CTO, and Steve Chen, YouTube Co-founder/CTO. Other investors came from family offices, fund-of-funds, an endowment, a sovereign wealth fund, and more.

“Because of their domain expertise and leadership in visual technology, LDV Capital is at the forefront of innovations in the space. They invest in and empower technical founders with the greatest potential for harnessing the power of computer vision to disrupt industries. The opportunities are tremendous.” Mike Krieger, Instagram, Co-Founder & Director of Engineering.

"Capturing and analyzing visual data with the aid of computers create a paradigm shift in the approach to content. I believe LDV Capital helps founders grow companies at the helm of this evolution." Steve Chen, Youtube, Co-Founder & CTO.

LDV Capital investments at the pre-seed stage include Clarifai - an artificial intelligence company that leverages visual recognition to solve real-world problems for businesses and developers, Mapillary - delivering street-level imagery for the future of maps and data solutions, and Upskill - delivering augmented reality solutions for the industrial workforce. They have assisted their portfolio companies in raising follow-on capital from Sequoia, Union Square Ventures, NEA, Atomico, and others.

“Visual technologies are revolutionizing businesses and society,” says LDV Capital General Partner, Evan Nisselson, a renowned thought leader in the visual tech space. “By 2022, our research has found there will be 45 billion cameras in the world capturing visual data that will be analyzed by artificial intelligence. Our goal is to collaborate with technical entrepreneurs who are looking to solve problems, build businesses, and improve our world with that visual data.”

LDV’s horizontal thesis spans all enterprise and consumer verticals such as autonomous vehicles, medical imaging, robotics, security, manufacturing, logistics, smart homes, satellite imaging, augmented/virtual/mixed reality, mapping, video, imaging, biometrics, 3D, 4D and much more.  

Every May, LDV Capital hosts the two-day LDV Vision Summit in NYC known to top technologists, investors, and entrepreneurs as the premier global gathering in visual tech. Since 2011, LDV Capital also holds invite-only, gender-balanced monthly LDV Community dinners that bring together leading NYC entrepreneurs and investors to help each other succeed. Both are part of their LDV Platform initiatives.

LDV Capital is one of the growing number of single GP funds, founded by Nisselson in 2012 after building four visual technology startups over 18 years in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Europe. The firm boasts an exceptionally strong expert network with their experts-in-residence including computer vision leaders such as Serge Belongie, a professor of Computer Science at Cornell University who also co-founded several companies and Andrew Rabinovich, Director of Deep Learning at Magic Leap, and Luc Vincent, VP of Engineering at Lyft and Gaile Gordon, Vice President Location Products at Enlighted.