Ascend Ventures

Ascend Ventures is a venture capital firm based in New York that focuses on supporting early-stage, data-centric technology companies across North America. Founded in 2000, the firm partners with ambitious entrepreneurs to facilitate financial and operational growth, aiming for rapid value creation. Ascend Ventures emphasizes the importance of alternative investments in achieving significant returns and building diversified portfolios. The firm combines financial expertise with unique investment opportunities to establish effective risk/reward partnerships. While Ascend Ventures has been associated with various industries, including software and technology, it is currently in the process of winding down operations and liquidating its remaining portfolio.

David C. Bowen

Founding Partner

Dan Conner

General Partner

Yinka Faleti

Partner

Levy J.D., Susan

Partner

David Moon

Associate

Kylie Sachs

Partner

Past deals in Austin, TX

Journey Foods

Seed Round in 2021
Journey Foods is a bold, machine learning-powered software platform for food companies. The company builds enterprise technology that improves product monitoring and development for CPG companies, ingredient suppliers, and manufacturers. With a focus on saving companies money and time, Journey Foods' tools accelerate innovation to improve their decision-making and operations with AI nutrition and supply chain insights embedded in integrative software. Journey Foods IO software enables food companies to quickly grow from new ideas, or new improvement, to commercialization by configuring desired consumer preferences, generating improved product formulations through ingredient tagging, receiving automated compliance and supply chain insights on nutrition and sustainability indicators, and seamless integrations to global ERP tools. The JourneyAI industry 4.0 solution gives management teams significantly faster data to make better strategic decisions and increase the ease of monitoring products for the 3 trillion dollar packaged foods market. The Journey Foods database retains an extensive and standardized database to extract data from millions of ingredients for algorithms to dynamically analyze and methodically recommended optimized portfolio recommendations based on pricing, supply chain, and nutrition parameters. To date, the company has established a database comprised of over 1 billion ingredient insights and learnings from our in-house prototyping product ‘Journey Bites’.

Journey Foods

Seed Round in 2021
Journey Foods is a bold, machine learning-powered software platform for food companies. The company builds enterprise technology that improves product monitoring and development for CPG companies, ingredient suppliers, and manufacturers. With a focus on saving companies money and time, Journey Foods' tools accelerate innovation to improve their decision-making and operations with AI nutrition and supply chain insights embedded in integrative software. Journey Foods IO software enables food companies to quickly grow from new ideas, or new improvement, to commercialization by configuring desired consumer preferences, generating improved product formulations through ingredient tagging, receiving automated compliance and supply chain insights on nutrition and sustainability indicators, and seamless integrations to global ERP tools. The JourneyAI industry 4.0 solution gives management teams significantly faster data to make better strategic decisions and increase the ease of monitoring products for the 3 trillion dollar packaged foods market. The Journey Foods database retains an extensive and standardized database to extract data from millions of ingredients for algorithms to dynamically analyze and methodically recommended optimized portfolio recommendations based on pricing, supply chain, and nutrition parameters. To date, the company has established a database comprised of over 1 billion ingredient insights and learnings from our in-house prototyping product ‘Journey Bites’.

Journey Foods

Venture Round in 2020
Journey Foods is a bold, machine learning-powered software platform for food companies. The company builds enterprise technology that improves product monitoring and development for CPG companies, ingredient suppliers, and manufacturers. With a focus on saving companies money and time, Journey Foods' tools accelerate innovation to improve their decision-making and operations with AI nutrition and supply chain insights embedded in integrative software. Journey Foods IO software enables food companies to quickly grow from new ideas, or new improvement, to commercialization by configuring desired consumer preferences, generating improved product formulations through ingredient tagging, receiving automated compliance and supply chain insights on nutrition and sustainability indicators, and seamless integrations to global ERP tools. The JourneyAI industry 4.0 solution gives management teams significantly faster data to make better strategic decisions and increase the ease of monitoring products for the 3 trillion dollar packaged foods market. The Journey Foods database retains an extensive and standardized database to extract data from millions of ingredients for algorithms to dynamically analyze and methodically recommended optimized portfolio recommendations based on pricing, supply chain, and nutrition parameters. To date, the company has established a database comprised of over 1 billion ingredient insights and learnings from our in-house prototyping product ‘Journey Bites’.

Infinite io

Convertible Note in 2019
Infinite io, Inc. is an innovative company focused on transforming the data storage landscape. Based in Austin, Texas and established in 2012, it offers the NSC-110, a network-based storage controller designed to optimize data management for organizations. The company's software efficiently migrates inactive data to cloud storage while retaining frequently accessed data on-site, allowing users seamless access to their information. This approach addresses the significant challenge of managing the exponential growth of inactive data, which often consumes a large portion of IT budgets. Infinite io’s technology combines Flash memory with cloud storage, enhancing performance for active data while offering a cost-effective solution for the ever-increasing volume of stored information.

StoryFit

Series A in 2019
StoryFit Inc. offers artificial intelligence insights and machine learning solutions for the book publishing, movie, and television production industries. The company’s products include StoryFit Metadata and StoryFit Analytics, which enables the publisher to analyze the metadata using artificial intelligence and provide insights related to audience targeting, reader personas, writing evaluation, faceted comps, and informed marketing intelligence. StoryFit Inc. was incorporated in 2014 and is headquartered in Austin, Texas.

Infinite io

Venture Round in 2015
Infinite io, Inc. is an innovative company focused on transforming the data storage landscape. Based in Austin, Texas and established in 2012, it offers the NSC-110, a network-based storage controller designed to optimize data management for organizations. The company's software efficiently migrates inactive data to cloud storage while retaining frequently accessed data on-site, allowing users seamless access to their information. This approach addresses the significant challenge of managing the exponential growth of inactive data, which often consumes a large portion of IT budgets. Infinite io’s technology combines Flash memory with cloud storage, enhancing performance for active data while offering a cost-effective solution for the ever-increasing volume of stored information.