The Praisidio team.

Our mission is protecting enterprise companies with data-driven, augmented intelligence tools that help manage talent risks at scale. By detecting issues months in advance and offering proactive, actionable insights, we help employers do a better job of caring for their employees.

Our leadership.

Ken Klein

Co-founder and CEO

Ken’s 25 years in Silicon Valley span roles as a CEO of private and public companies, and as a member of 16 technology company boards, both venture capital and private equity-backed. Ken holds a B.S. in electrical engineering and biomedical engineering from the University of Southern California. He is a USC Distinguished Alumnus, member of the USC Viterbi School of Engineering Board of Councilors, founder of USC's Klein Institute for Undergraduate Engineering Life (KIUEL), a USC Trustee, and Chair of the USC Audit, Compliance, Risk, and Privacy Committee.

Vahed Qazvinian

Co-founder and CTO

A computer scientist and tech entrepreneur, Vahed holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, specializing in Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. He has published over 20 papers in top AI journals and been invited to speak at multiple conferences. Vahed has founded a YC-backed startup and served as a Microsoft Research intern. During his tenure at Google, he developed machine learning algorithms that digest huge quantities of data and provide answers to new types of natural language queries in over 10 languages.

Our investors.

Elaine Zelby

Partner, SignalFire

Elaine splits her time between investing out of SignalFire's seed fund and working with the portfolio on growth and GTM strategy. She has built and led Product Marketing teams, led Enterprise Product Marketing at Slack, and has helped grow a variety of enterprise functions including marketing, inside sales, and lead and demand generation. She is also a co-founder of Product Marketing Masters, a group focused on communication, education and advisory for top Product Marketing professionals. Elaine holds a B.S. and M.S in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford.

Frederik Groce

Partner, Storm Ventures

In addition to his duties at Storm Ventures, Frederik is a co-founder at BLCK VC. After completing his studies at Stanford, Frederik spent two years as CEO of Stanford Student Enterprises (SSE) with more than one hundred employees and total assets exceeding $18 million – including overseeing Stanford’s accelerator program. Frederik is also a mentor with the East Bay College Fund which works with minority college students coming from underprivileged communities throughout the East Bay Area.

Allison Baum Gates

General Partner, SemperVirens Venture Capital

With her unique skillset establishing, raising, launching, and deploying early stage venture capital funds across multiple geographies, Allison is a globally recognized thought leader in the future of work, featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Pitchbook, Business Insider, Inc., Quartz, Bloomberg Tech, Venture Beat, and Silicon Republic. She is an active writer, speaker and lecturer on innovation, venture capital, public and private markets, the future of work, and technology startups.

Ash Patel

Founding Partner, Morado Ventures

A long-time product and engineering leader with Yahoo! Inc., Ash most recently served as the company’s Chief Technology Evangelist. He has held a number of positions at the company over the years, including Senior Vice President of Platform Engineering, Chief Product Officer, and Executive Vice President of the Audience Platform Division. Over a decade, Ash built a hand-selected team of approximately 1,500 engineers who scaled Yahoo!’s infrastructure and products to handle hundreds of millions of users and their data. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Kings College of the University of London.

David Lane

Founder and Partner, 1Flourish Capital

1Flourish Capital is a VC fund that invests in and supports entrepreneurs who are fully committed to principled executive leadership/company culture and see this as the key factor in developing a high performing and successful company.  During the past 30+ years, David has directly co-managed institutional venture capital funds totaling in excess of $3 Billion. He founded Diamondhead Ventures, was a Managing Director at ONSET Ventures, and held a Senior Venture Capital Investment Officer position at the Harvard Management Company, through which manages Harvard University’s endowment. David earned a B.S.E.E. degree from the University of Southern California and an M.B.A. from the Harvard Business School.

SignalFire was founded as a bootstrapped startup with the goal of disrupting the way that venture capital is done. By applying unmatched data and technology to address the top pain points of early-stage startups, SignalFire produces an unfair advantage and outsized success for their portfolio.

Since launching their first fund in 2015, SignalFire has scaled quickly to $1B in regulatory assets under management. They continue to build products and scalable processes that help their clients with the first steps of their journey.

Semper Virens Venture Capital harnesses a powerful ecosystem to understand how technology is impacting employers and employees in real-time. The firm is at the heart of a strategic network of people-focused investors, operators, industry analysts, and consulting firms that provide a proprietary source of high-quality dealflow, real-time insight into market needs and buying patterns, and post-investment distribution for their portfolio companies.

Storm Ventures is an early stage venture capital firm focused on “Building Enterprise Leaders” as the first or early investor. Storm’s current enterprise software investments include Algolia, AtScale, Digital Shadows, Engagio, Guidespark, MobileIron, Pipedrive, Workato, Sendoso and Talkdesk. The company was the first or early investor in Airespace (Cisco), Cellfire (Catalina), Com2uS (KOSDAQ IPO), EchoSign (Adobe), Kidaro (Microsoft), iML (Taiwan IPO/Exar), Marketo (IPO/Vista), Metacloud (Cisco), Sandforce (LSI), and Sierra Monolithics (Semtech). Founded by industry veterans, Storm has over $800 million under management.

For too long, companies have had to suffer with technology that didn’t put the human at the center; Praisidio is changing that. We’re thrilled to be investing behind Ken and Vahed as two founders on a mission to build human-centered AI.

Frederik Groce
Partner, Storm Ventures

Morado Ventures is a seed-stage venture fund that invests in companies leading the data revolution. The team has extensive experience leading and investing in technology companies led by tech innovators building the next generation of data-fueled businesses. From seed to maturity, Morado prides itself on being with the companies it invests in every step of the way. The firm looks for passionate entrepreneurs with unique expertise working on hard technological problems with software and hardware in industries ripe for disruption. Their current focus areas include AI, Data Infrastructure, Industrial Internet, Robotics & Autonomy, and Computer Vision and Health.

We’re thrilled to be working with the remarkable team at Praisidio. Our own experiences managing corporate teams made clear the value of the type of insights and actionable information Praisidio can provide. We’re strong believers in their mission and look forward to helping them along their journey.

Ash Patel
Managing Partner, Morado Ventures

Essential advisors.

Homa Bahrami

Author, Senior lecturer at the Haas School of Business

A Senior Lecturer, Distinguished Teaching Fellow, and Faculty Director at the Haas School of Business, University of California at Berkeley, Homa is an international educator, advisor, board member and author, specializing in organizational flexibility, team alignment, and dynamic leadership in global, knowledge-based industries.
She is the co-author of the book Managerial Psychology: Managing Behavior in Organizations and author of Super-Flexibility for Knowledge Enterprises, which focuses on practical approaches for strategizing, organizing and leading knowledge workers based on their collective experience and field research in Silicon Valley during the past 30 years. Homa serves on the Boards of Directors of two public technology companies and is active in executive education and executive development in the U.S., Europe, and Asia. She is the Faculty Director for the New Manager Boot Camp for Scientists & Engineers, virtual courses on Leadership Re-Invention Studio, and several custom programs for leading global companies.

Vincent Rerolle

Principal, AXXELER8

Vincent is a strategic thinker with more than 25 years of software and technology experience, with a track record of growth and new business development in companies ranging from very early stage startups to NASDAQ-listed public companies across multiple sectors, including SaaS, PaaS, embedded systems, Enterprise Software and IoT.

John Renfro

Founder and Partner, 1Flourish Capital

John has spent a career driving the people dimension of business strategy, and is the former Senior Vice President and Chief HR Officer at the Capital Group. He led the company's worldwide HR organization and was responsible for driving its global human capital strategy, and served on the Board of Directors of the Capital Research and Management Company. The Capital Group is one of the world's largest investment management firms and manages over $2.6 trillion in assets for millions of investors.

Prior to joining Capital Group, John was the EVP and Chief HR Officer at AECOM. Previously he served as the VP of HR for Hewlett-Packard Company. Before that, he was the SVP and Chief HR Officer at The Walt Disney Company, and at Gateway Computers.

John is a founding member of the Executive Advisory Board of SemperVirens Venture Capital, and serves as an advisor to HR Tech companies.

Doug Solomon

Chief Legal Officer, RMS

Doug's professional specialties include corporate governance, mergers and acquisitions, SaaS/cloud computing, software and technology transactions, AI, machine learning, natural language processing, privacy, international business and law, securities law, and public stock offerings. He boasts extensive corporate development experience, including a portfolio of international clients.