Storm History
Storm Ventures originated in 1997 by a group of entrepreneurs and executives that had worked together for almost a decade at a start-up called Stratacom, which was founded in 1986. During this decade, Stratacom achieved a revenue run-rate of about $500 million before it was acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996, for almost $5 billion. The NASDAQ trading symbol for Stratacom was STRM, pronounced “storm”, hence Storm Ventures.
We have always believed we could be most successful as investors and most helpful to entrepreneurs as first or early investors in enterprise focused businesses. This is how we started and this is what we continue to focus on today. The original Storm I was funded entirely by the Storm team. We were fortunate to have invested in many successful companies during that time period such as Lightera and Netscaler.
In September 2000, we raised Storm II which became the full time focus of the team. While we and many of our companies had to endure the tech market correction from the excesses of the late 1990s, we were able to find successes in mobile and software such as Airespace, Berkana, Com2uS, Kidaro and Sierra Monolithics. The fund has substantial holdings in IML and Com2uS which are both traded on foreign public exchanges as well as other companies we believe are well positioned for success.
In March 2005, the team raised Storm III with the support of many industry executives and a handful of institutional investors. Out of Storm III, we were the first or early investor in a handful of companies with great teams that identified many markets early and demonstrated their ability to execute and scale such as SandForce (infrastructure), EchoSign (SaaS) and most recently Marketo (SaaS), which went public in May 2013 and trades as MKTO on NASDAQ.
In April 2013, we raised Storm IV and are actively investing as the first or early investor in our focus areas of mobile, SaaS and cloud services.
We believe a long history of working together as a team and a strong network have been key ingredients to our success. The entrepreneurs we have backed and the successes that they have had reflect our success as a firm. As we enter 2013, we continue to build on our foundation of making entrepreneurs successful and being a part of building companies of enduring value.