General Partner

David Hornik

Executive Assistant: Jenna Lorenzano
 
General Partner

David Hornik

Executive Assistant: Jenna Lorenzano
 
General Partner

David Hornik

Executive Assistant: Jenna Lorenzano
 

For the last 20 years, David has worked closely with technology companies to help them grow and prosper. David joined August Capital in 2000 to invest in a broad range of software companies. Since that time, he has invested in dozens of companies across the software spectrum, including a number of enterprise software and SaaS (e.g, Splunk, Fastly, GitLab), consumer services (e.g., Evite, Ebates, Drop), and financial technology companies (e.g., WePay, Bill.com, PayNearMe).

Along with colleagues at August Capital, David started the first venture capital blog, VentureBlog, and the first venture capital podcast, VentureCast. He is the creator and executive producer of the The Lobby and Lobby:Enterprise, August Capital’s annual gatherings of the thought leaders across digital media and enterprise/SaaS software — www.thelobbyconference.com. David has also served as the Tech Curator for the TED Conference in Vancouver and is the co-creator and host of TEDxStanford. He received Deloitte’s 2013 Venture Capitalist of the Year award and has been honored by Forbes Magazine as a member of its Midas List of top Venture Capitalists.

David has an eclectic educational background. He received an BA from Stanford in Computer Music, an M.Phil in Criminology from Cambridge University, and a JD from Harvard Law School. He teaches courses in entrepreneurship and venture capital at Stanford Business School and Harvard Law School, and serves as a VC Partner at the Harvard Business School. David is the vice-chair of GLAAD, a leading LGBTQ rights organization, and is a member of the board of the Stanford Alumni Association.

David lives in Palo Alto with his wife Pamela, their four children, and their puppy Teddy.

Current August investments: Brilliant Home Technology, Dock Health, Drop, Fletch, HiHello, LiveOps, Kentik, MaintainX, PayNearMe, Workona, and Yumi.

Select Previous August investments: Aardvark (acquired by Google), Aisle50, Bill.com (NYSE: BILL), eBates (acquired by Rakuten), Evite (acquired by Ticketmaster), Fastly (NYSE: FSLY), GitLab (NASDAQ: GTLB), Gravity (acquired by AOL), Nomis Solutions (acquired by Symphony Technology Group), PayCycle (acquired by Intuit), Second Spectrum (acquired by Genius Sports), ShopRunner (acquired by FedEx), Splunk (NasdaqGS: SPLK), TalkShow (acquired by Medium), Tickle (acquired by Monster), Tophatter, WePay (acquired by JPMorganChase).

 
 

Select Active Investments

Industry Sector: IoT

Headquartered: San Mateo, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Brilliant Home Technology: Brilliant’s mission is to create technology that makes it easy and fun to interact directly with your home. We envision a world in which every environment, homes in particular, can communicate directly with its guests in a way that is simple and fun. Controlling an environment should be as easy as flipping a switch, so it’s really no surprise that’s where we started – replacing the light switch with the interaction model of the future. Brilliant was founded by Aaron Emigh, Steven Stanek, and Jeremy Hiatt, all of whom are experienced technology entrepreneurs from the mobile industry. All three worked together at shopkick, who developed the #1 retail mobile app before being acquired by SK Planet in 2014. Brilliant was started when Aaron began renovating his house and went looking for a product he was sure existed – an easy- to-use touch panel that replaces your light switch to control everything in the house. When one couldn’t be found, he teamed up with Steven and Jeremy to do what awesome nerds do, and they built one.

Industry Sector: Enterprise

Headquartered: Boston, MA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Dock Health: Dock gives your team a simple, HIPAA-compliant way to manage all your daily administrative and clinical tasks.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

MassDrop: Massdrop is an online community for enthusiasts that provides people across several communities — from audio and electronics to quilting and cooking — a place to connect, discuss their favorite products and activities, and buy those products together.

Industry Sector: SAAS

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Fletch: The world is changing at the speed of code. As more companies adopt more and more cloud and SaaS technologies to run their business, data is becoming the lifeblood. Protecting this data is now a core business need. The problem is understanding what is going on and getting the insights needed requires expensive DIY analytics tools and countless hours from your most technical people, that is if you have the people and they have the cycles (most don’t), to derive any value. This is where Fletch comes in. With Fletch you instantly get the cybersecurity data intelligence you need to run your business with peace of mind. No data plumbing required. Write ZERO code. Timely answers delivered right to your inbox. At a price anyone can afford.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

HiHello: Exchange contacts, seamlessly.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: Vivek Mehra

Kentik: Kentik is a big data-based SaaS for network visibility, DDoS detection, and infrastructure optimization. We scale to any volume of traffic, catch issues in moments, and inform your response with data-driven insights. Ready for network intelligence at Terabit scale? Kentik is your visibility solution.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: Redwood City, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

LiveOps: In a world of piece-meal solutions, LiveOps set out to “answer the call” of modern day customer engagement. We cracked the code for enabling fast, smart communication – regardless of the incoming channel. Gone are the siloed channels of phone, email, chat, and social media. Gone is the church and state line between marketing and customer service. With LiveOps, brands have a 24/7, 360-degree ability to connect with consumers faster, better and cost-effectively. Customers and brands finally have a two-way, real-time interaction on the consumer’s channel of choice whether it be traditional voice, email, chat, SMS, social or mobile.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

MaintainX: MaintainX is a mobile-first Frontline Record Management (FRM) platform that empowers operational leaders to manage workflows with their frontline teams and improve communication – all with a digital audit trail.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: Sunnyvale, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Handle Financial (dba PayNearMe): The Handle Financial family is led by a team of experts from the payments, mobile and retail IT worlds. We exist to build affordably-priced, innovative products that make it easier for consumers to conduct financial transactions and for businesses to serve those consumers. The PayNearMe transaction network allows businesses and government agencies to accept cash payments in 28,000 stores nationwide, including CVS Pharmacy, 7-Eleven, Family Dollar and more. Handle Platform provides real-time bill presentment and same-day payment capabilities for a variety of financial services products. The Prism Money app empowers consumers to manage their financial lives more efficiently, giving them visibility into the money they have and tracking and same-day payments for the bills they need to pay.

Industry Sector: Data Communications

Headquartered: Mountain View

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

SabSe (jaxter): Sabse Technologies Inc. was founded by Yogesh Patel and Sabeer Bhatia in January 2008. Sabse’s first product is Sabsebolo – a cloud-based voice conferencing and fax-to-email service. Since its launch, Sabsebolo has attracted over 500,000 small businesses who use the service for hosting conference calls and receive faxes through their email. Sabse Technologies has acquired 3 companies with promising technologies. – Jaxtr Inc., Mobivox and Vysr. Jaxtr is an IP Messaging platform with APPs for Text, Voice and Video, Mobivoxis a Cloud based PBX. Vysr is a scalable presence engine in the cloud. Why Sabse? Sabse has built a scaleable Cloud Communications Platform which providers developers a robust infrastructure to develop Voice and Text applications on. Sabse has built 3 apps of its own on this platform – PBX, Voice Conferencing and IVR.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Workona: Workona helps you get your tabs under control to increase productivity, reduce stress, and bring focus to your work. Modern teams run on cloud software and our browser productivity suite helps them run faster. We’ve baked our productivity suite into the core of your browser because that’s where you actually do your work. Collaboration should mean more than just typing into the same doc as someone else. Now you can work as a team where you’re already working on your own. We’re building the operating system for work in the cloud and workspaces are just the start. Workspaces are smart browser windows that can be used to organize all your work on the web. Whether you work in product, marketing, sales, or any other team, your workspaces will ensure everything you need to do your job is always at your fingertips.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: Los Angeles, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik, Tripp Jones

Yumi: From the Founders — We started this company because Angela is a giant nerd. You see, when she became pregnant with her first child, Elodie, she spent months researching nutrition. She discovered that scientists consider nutrition in the first 1,000 days to be the most important environmental factor in development. Babies’ brains, their senses, their fat cell production, and their proclivity for sweets are all shaped during this time. And yet, despite this overwhelming research, there were no convenient options for parents who wanted fresh, nutritious, and yummy meals for their baby.We got angry. We got inspired. We quit respectable jobs. We founded Yumi. Whether you use us for all or some of your meals, cook, or buy other brands, we hope our content and products inspire and empower you – and somehow make your life a little bit easier.

Select Exited Investments

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Mechanical Zoo (Aardvark) (acquired by Google): Aardvark is a social search engine that allows users to ask questions and receive answers from their extended network.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: Palo Alto, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Bill.com (NYSE:BILL): Bill.com is the leading digital business payments company creating magically simple A/P and A/R solutions. We are uniquely positioned at the center of business payments, uniting banks, accountants, and businesses on the fastest growing payments network. Bill.com helps over 600,000 network members process over $19 billion in payments per year and saves companies up to 50 percent of the time typically spent on financial back-office operations by securely automating their end-to-end processes.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

eBates (acquired by Rakuten): Ebates is the pioneer and leader of online Cash Back Shopping.

Industry Sector: Data Communications

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Fastly (NYSE:FSLY): Fastly is redefining content delivery. Our mission is to help businesses operate in real time and increase their speed of innovation. With Fastly, you can manage traffic spikes and mitigate security threats all while improving the performance of your website and mobile application.

 

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: Distributed Worldwide Team

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

GitLab (NASDAQ:GTLB): GitLab Inc. is a company based on the GitLab open-source project. GitLab is an application to code, test, and deploy code together. It provides Git repository management with fine grained access controls, code reviews, issue tracking, activity feeds, wikis, and continuous integration.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: Santa Monica, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Gravity (acquired by AOL): When we founded Gravity the vision was simple – “Let’s Personalize the Internet.” The foundation of our personalization engine is a framework we call the Interest Graph, which is the set of things you care about and how much you care about them. We generate interest graphs and apply them for personalization throughout our growing network of sites and apps. Our goal is nothing less than creating magical personalized experiences for you across the entire web.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: San Bruno, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Nomis Solutions: Nomis Solutions is a fast-growth software company that combines cutting-edge Silicon Valley approaches to big data, advanced modeling, and deep analytics to help large and medium-sized retail banks better understand their customers.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: Cupertino, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

PayCycle (acquired by Intuit): SMB Online Payroll Application Service Provider.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: Los Angeles, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Second Spectrum (acquired by Genius Sports): Second Spectrum was founded in 2013 by Rajiv Maheswaran, Yu-Han Chang, and Jeff Su. Rajiv and Yu-Han were faculty in USC’s Computer Science Department and Jeff was a software engineer at Factual, a leading big data company. In their spare time, Rajiv and Yu-Han began a project analyzing NBA player tracking data, working with a few talented USC undergrads (who later joined the Second Spectrum team). Their work was awarded with the Best Research Paper at the 2012 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, garnering the attention of professional sports leagues and teams. They won a second Best Research Paper at Sloan two years later. Today, we have over 40 full-time employees, including former professors, big data startup veterans, talented undergraduates, incredible designers and professional athletes. Together, we are transforming sports through technology.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: Chicago, IL

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

ShopRunner (acquired by FedEx): ShopRunner connects top retailers and brands to the best online shoppers. ShopRunner’s exclusive member benefits and highly targeted, data-driven marketing help retail partners acquire high value customers while increasing existing customers’ purchase frequency and spend.

Led by CEO Sam Yagan, ShopRunner’s team of e-commerce experts are backed by Kynetic, Alibaba Group and American Express. ShopRunner has offices in Chicago, San Mateo and Philadelphia.

Industry Sector: Software and Services

Headquartered: San Francisco, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Splunk (SPLK): It enables the curious to look closely at what others ignore—machine data—and find what others never see: insights that can help make your company more productive, profitable, competitive and secure. What can you do with Splunk?

Just ask. We see data—everywhere. Splunk® offers the leading platform for Operational Intelligence.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: NA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Tickle (acquired by Monster): A media company providing self-discovery and social networking services. Formerly known as Emode.com, Tickle was founded on the idea that personal insight and connections to others can be scientific, fun and profitable. The site also allowed users to create their own tests, which were available for other users to take.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: Palo Alto, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

Tophatter (Blippy): Tophatter is a virtual auction house. It also happens to be the world’s most entertaining live marketplace. Tophatter conducts live online auction every day where buyers and sellers can interact, chat and transact in a wide variety of categories.

Industry Sector: eCommerce

Headquartered: Palo Alto, CA

Lead Investment Professional: David Hornik

WePay (acquired by JPMorgan Chase): WePay is built for companies facilitating transactions between merchants and payers on their platform. We understand that these three party transactions (merchants, payers, your platform) have their own unique needs and we’re designed with your needs in mind. The payments API calls are grouped into three categories, based on the key points in the payment user experience. Explore them below and see the flexibility you have in designing your platform’s unique user experience.