Where Are Visual Technologies Powering Gaming, and the Metaverse?
/LDV Capital invests in people building businesses powered by visual technologies. We thrive on collaborating with deep tech teams leveraging computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to analyze visual data. We are the only venture capital firm with this thesis.
We are delighted to announce that Azeem Khan joins our team as a Venture Fellow this Summer. His interest and hands-on experience with gaming, NFTs, the metaverse, and by extension, blockchain technology, will add insights into our evaluation process of new investment opportunities across these sectors.
Azeem Khan
I’m delighted to be joining the LDV Capital team for the summer of 2021. My career trajectory to where I am today has been anything but linear. Having received a B.S in Biology and M.S in Medical Sciences, both from Boston University, I aspired to attend medical school. While in the midst of applying, I was running the Boston Marathon the year that the bombings occurred and was also living in Boston at the time. After realizing how short life was that week I decided to rescind my medical school apps, quit a job at a biotech company I was working at, and decided to go full time into a tech startup I’d been working at the time called Supshot, which was an app that allowed people to license content they took on their smartphones.
Funny enough, my first encounter with Evan was later that year when I met him at the LeWeb tech conference in 2013 wanting to pitch him our idea. Supshot didn’t work out, but it gave me my first taste of entrepreneurism and a giant set of learnings.
Since then, I’ve spent time in the media contributing with the Huffington Post interviewing artists and primarily from the hip hop industry such as Big Sean, Bun B, Yo Gotti, Talib Kweli, Jermaine Dupri, TI, Kid Ink, and even Mark Cuban. I tried launching my cryptocurrency in 2014 called Kim Coindashian, long before people were talking about social tokens like they are today. Then I ran a small mobile development shop where my company worked with artists like Kanye West, Teyana Taylor, Bryson Tiller, Rae Sremmurd, and Dreamville Records.
I got my second real taste of business building when I launched Unanimous Games, an esports company, alongside Roc Nation music executive Briant Biggs for almost three years before leaving to join a mobile game startup called Aglet pre-launch.
As Head of Growth and Partnerships at Aglet, I led deals with the likes of Gucci and Stadium Goods, built a community of users, and grew Aglet to a six-figure user base. We raised over $7M and had been covered in Forbes, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Vogue Business, and Business Insider among others. My time at Aglet really piqued my interest in where NFTs could go.
I’ve joined LDV for the summer as Venture Fellow to really delve into gaming, NFTs, the metaverse, and, by extension, blockchain technology because I believe it’ll help power all of them.
I’ll also be helping source investment opportunities and assist in due diligence. While some believe these topics are fads, I believe that the lives of young people today rely just as much on digital worlds as it does on the physical one, so these trends are here to stay. I’m excited to be collaborating with LDV to find people to partner with and invest in.
In my free time, I’m an avid bookworm reading fiction or nonfiction depending on my mood, love to box, play more video games than I should, watch lots of cartoons/anime, and enjoy traveling (when the world isn’t shut down).
If you’re an entrepreneur building something powered by visual technologies, especially in gaming, NFTs, metaverse, and much more, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out and I look forward to learning about what you are building.
