Kemp Au Ventures
[Update 11/28/24: Tom is taking a break from angel investing and is currently not doing any net new investing.]
Kemp Au Ventures is simply a placeholder name for two friends — Tom Kemp and Adam Au — who “angel” invest in early-stage (i.e., “seed”) tech companies. By way of background, we are entrepreneurs who founded and built multiple tech companies that either went public or were acquired by strategics or private equity buyers. We have built companies that have scaled from $0 to over $250m in revenue, were named a “Best Place to Work” by Glassdoor, and Tom was even named a NorCal “Entrepreneur of the Year” Finalist by EY.
We are not a VC fund or Venture Capitalists; we are simply two individuals who co-invest small amounts of “seed” money alongside other angels/seed investors and great early-stage VC firms such as Mango Capital, Lightspeed, Z5 Capital, NewFund, 11.2 Capital, Westwave, Dell Technology Ventures, Okta Ventures, and ffVC. We typically invest in infrastructure-focused areas (e.g., cybersecurity) with underlying technology that is powered by AI. Our investments may be small and rounding errors in a new company’s cap table, but we think having former operators like us collaborate with new founders in the early stages of company formation and product/market fit is helpful.
Connect and contact us through LinkedIn if you want to talk.
Here are some of Tom’s current investments, sorted by most recent:
THE FASTEST WAY FOR RETAILERS TO GO TO MARKET
Sonans AI is the fastest way for retailers to stay relevant in the world of fast fashion and influencer-led sales. Our commerce agent reduces time spent on trend spotting and competitive pricing from 10 weeks to 1 week, ensuring you're never late to the market.
SaaS for Campaigns & Nonprofits
Numero is a modern fundraising platform powered by AI that elected officials and candidates at all levels of public office can use to manage the $24 billion in contributions to political campaigns.
Automate Your Dubbing Needs
Speechlab uses the power of AI to automate dubbing for audio and video. Upload a file and get an editable transcript, translation, and dub in the same voices.
USER SECURITY AUTOMATION
Amplifier Security' is the first automation platform designed to interact with end-users. Their solution solves the age-old problem of user security by scaling IT & security operations to the last mile.
Autonomous Security
Uno.ai is an expert investigation and insights platform for cybersecurity threat surface management, incident response, and forensics. Agentless and multi-cloud by design it acts as a 1000x booster for super fast and effective evidence gathering, root-cause analysis, inference, and remediation.
Authentication With Official Identity
Enable real-time, on-demand verification of user identities and sharing of personal information through a reusable digital identity solution.
AI-powered Platform for Geospatial Data Production
EyeVi Technologies offers an on-demand mapping technology for capturing and processing high accuracy geodata cost-effectively and fast.
The Data Sharing Cloud
Trusted Twin, the industry’s most robust developer platform, unlocks data-sharing opportunities for businesses with the power of Digital Twins.
AI Governance, Risk and Compliance
Drive innovation, minimize risk, and move from concept to production faster with Holistic AI — the leading AI governance platform.
CONTINUITY CLOUD
Keep your business operational during major cyberattacks and IT outages with the Astran Continuity Cloud.
Simplifying the Complexity of Last Mile Logistics
Streamline route planning and tracking with Enroute’s innovative technology. Helps you grow your business with intelligent routing, improved workflow and better visibility.
Risk Management for cyber insurance policies
Sold through cyber insurance companies, Privaini gives enterprises visibility into the effects of regulatory updates, security events, and changes to the privacy posture of any company within their business ecosystem.
The First Zero Trust Browser
Identity driven chromium-based zero-trust browser. Create a secured environment on any endpoint. Allow your employees to work wherever, whenever, and however they want, supporting their productivity and privacy.
DATA SECUrITY POSTURE MANAGEMENT
Secuvy offers a set of AI-powered capabilities for securing data, including discovery, classification, and DSPM (data security posture management).
Here are some of Tom’s past investments:
Acquired by Thoma Bravo (2018) & TPG (2021)
Centrify is a leader in privileged access management. Tom and Adam were co-founders of Centrify, raising over $90m from top tier VCs (Accel, Index, Mayfield and JSV) and strategics (Samsung, Fortinet, Docomo Capital). Centrify reached over $100m in revenue under Tom’s and Adam’s leadership with 1000s of enterprise customers, including 60% of Fortune 50. Adam and Tom were investors in both the VC- and PE-funded iterations of Centrify. Centrify was first acquired by PE-firm Thoma Bravo in 2018 and then by PE-firm TPG in 2021.
Acquired by CyberArk (Nasdaq: CYBR)
A spin out of Centrify, Idaptive delivers Next-Gen Access, protecting organizations from data breaches through a Zero Trust approach. Idaptive secures access to applications and endpoints by verifying every user, validating their devices, and intelligently limiting their access. Tom and Adam were investors in the PE-owned Idaptive that was acquired by CyberArk in 2020.
IPO (Nasdaq: NTIQ) and subsequent acquisitions by Attachmate and then MicroFocus (Lon: MCRO)
NetIQ was a startup systems management company that went public in 1999 (Nasdaq:NTIQ), scaled to over $250m in revenue and subsequently went private in 2007 through its acquisition by Attachmate, and then was sold as part of Attachmate to MicroFocus.
Acquired by Citrix Systems (Nasdaq: CTXS)
Zenprise provided enterprise mobility management (EMM) aka Mobile Device Management (MDM) and was rebranded Citrix XenMobile.
Acquired by Alpine Holdings (Nasdaq: ALPP)
Vayu Aircraft was founded to create an entirely new category of drone: a fully autonomous vertical takeoff aircraft that is affordable, easy to use, carries a significant payload, and travels long distances. Vayu was acquired in 2021 by Nasdaq traded Alpine Holdings.
Acquired by ADT (Nasdaq: ADT)
Proximex was a leader in event and information management for both physical and logical security markets.
Acquired by Ping Identity (Nasdaq: PING) and then Thoma Bravo
Singular Key enables continuously adaptive identity workflows that helps companies eliminate the burden and cost of managing integrations with multiple vendors in order to deliver onboarding and authentication journeys. Singular Key was Kemp Au Venture’s first investment and was acquired by Ping Identity in September of 2021.
ACQUIRED BY ABAXX TECHNOLOGIES (OTCMKTS: ABXXF)
PrivacyCode is a SaaS platform with a translation engine that turns complex privacy policies into a language developers understand, using agile methodologies. It provides context in a world they already know and integrates with tools they already use.
ATLAS: Personal cybersecurity & privacy
Round Robin (dba Atlas Data Privacy) was founded with the belief that people should have control over who has their personal information. Atlas provides the website DataBreach.com to track if your personal data was caught up in a data breach.