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Andrew Smyth

Managing Partner - M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund

Andrew Smyth is a seasoned professional with a diverse background in economics, finance, and statistics.

He holds a Master's Degree in Economics, Finance, and Statistics from the University of London.

Andrew Smyth has an impressive career history, having held various key roles in prominent organizations.

Previously, he served as the Managing Partner at M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund, showcasing his expertise in investment and business management.

Additionally, Andrew Smyth has been an investor and held board member positions in several successful enterprises such as Seemplicity, SOC Prime, Seaplane IO, AttackIQ, and Graphiant.

His contributions extend to companies like Selector Software, Aizon, Elisity Inc., Vectra AI, Secondmind, Devo, and Striim, where he played crucial roles as an investor, board member, or partner.

Andrew Smyth's involvement in initiatives like Dublin.AI, Atlantic Bridge, Arma Partners, and PwC Ireland highlights his proactive engagement in the tech and financial sectors.

His vast experience in investment banking, advisory services, and organizational leadership underscores his strategic prowess and industry insights.

Andrew Smyth is a notable figure in the realm of technology investments, demonstrating a keen interest in fostering innovation and growth within the startup ecosystem.

With his background and accomplishments, Andrew Smyth continues to be a valuable asset in driving success and fostering strategic partnerships.

Highlights

Aug 8 · linkedin

TechCrunch covered some of the details behind our investment in Neon.

TL;DR: Modern developers want to use Postgres, and Neon is building the best Postgres platform for developers.

M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund are excited to be part of the journey!

Feb 29 · linkedin

Some updates for February from the Open Source Security Index💪

Platformization: hot topic right now given the Palo Alto Networks drama last week. This topic has been well covered by folks like Ed Sim, Cole Grolmus and Francis Odum 🫡

The debate about platform vs. point solutions did remind me of something we have started to keep track of on the Open Source Security Index
👉 https://lnkd.in/gWT7_Q4X

💡 As a reminder, we monitor over 600+ open source security projects, representing the top 100 most popular & fastest growing on the Index. This dataset grows every day!

🕵️ Analyzing this data over time, one emerging theme has been hard to ignore. There are now a number of high-momentum projects on the index created and maintained by one entity, typically a startup. The strategy seems clear: multiple projects, providing complementary tools that in combination can offer end-to-end coverage within a category or workflow, e.g., Vulnerability Management, App & Container Security, Supply Chain Security,

✅ Examples:

Aqua Security: has a number of popular open source tools for application & container security. Trivy (#12 on the OSS Index) is one of the most popular scanners for container & VM misconfigurations and can be used in conjunction with Kube-bench (#72) to check K8 deployment compliance. Additionally, Aqua Security supports Kube-hunter, Tracee and Kubectl-who-can, complementary projects offering tools across the application security lifecycle

ProjectDiscovery.io: provides a whole suite of open source tools for attack surface management / vulnerability management, including Nuclei (#35 on the OSS Index) one of the the most popular vulnerability scanners (50m + monthly scans). Security engineers can use 20+ open source tools from ProjectDiscovery.io (3 of which are on Index top 100 🤯) interchangeably, for asset discovery, analysis and vulnerability detection. That’s a lot of community activity (70k+ stars) and collaboration across a critical security workflow (full disclosure I’m an investor in Project Discovery)

Companies like Sysdig, Ory Corp and Anchore with projects on the OSS Index appear to be pursuing similar strategies

🚀 fastest risers on the Index 100:

Mkcert (#20): Tool for making locally-trusted development certificates that require no configuration from Filippo Valsorda

Rewrite (#75): Automated refactoring engine for source code, enables developers to eliminate technical debt & complete security fixes within their repositories from Moderne.io

Clamav (#93): Antivirus engine for detecting trojans, viruses, malware from Cisco

Cc: Chenxi Wang, Ph.D. #startups #opensource #venturecapital

Andrew Smyth
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Location

Palo Alto, California, United States