Canaan Partners founded in 1987, headquartered at Menlo Park, CA, invests in visionary entrepreneurs and provides them the networks, insights and operational guidance required to build technology and healthcare companies. The firm has around $3.5 billion funds under its management

Technologies like NoSQL and Hadoop are responsible for major increase in the unstructured data types. There are now companies capturing terabytes and even petabytes of data. Canaan has investments equally in both consumer and enterprise businesses. On the enterprise side, the big data revolution has a huge impact on the investments. Virsto and Talena address the storage gaps in the big data landscape and Metacloud provides enterprise-grade cloud platforms. Furthermore, a major focus area is around innovations that not only enable analysis, but that also derives actionable insights. The investments in WibiData and Skybox Imaging, recently acquired by Google, are build on this thesis.

On the consumer side, online and mobile marketplaces are a major theme. Marketplace businesses present new possibilities for consumerism, such as Relay Rides, One Fine Stay, The Real Real, Instacart, and Lending Club.

Technology Transmogrified

In relation to Canaan's enterprise, focus lies on big data, which evolves the upcoming generation of Business Intelligence (BI) tools. There are many exciting technologies enabling users to analyze huge data sets from multiple channels for the first time. For instance, Beckon is a solution for marketers to manage and optimize expenditure. Canaan is discovering remedies that will reduce friction points in the BI stack, such as next-gen data extraction and cleaning solutions, or more vertical approaches in big data.

Another area is the trend in DevOps as containerization technologies create big changes in the datacenter. The realm of opportunity in the way that applications are built, tested, shipped, and run is just in the beginning stages with these advances.

Opportunity for Big Innovations

It is not news that the mobile market is growing fiercely - with nearly 2B smart phone users and almost $30 billion this year in consumer app revenue alone. At this, many start-ups are developing mobile-first tools that are focused on mobile monetization. The next wave of innovation will be around mobile engagement and personalization solutions. The next solutions will be context-aware and predictive in nature- providing the deepest level of analytics and interaction with users.

Roadblocks for Entrepreneurs

It is observed as in regards with the explosion of SaaS businesses that it is easier and cheaper to start an enterprise business, but it is incredibly difficult to scale. Entrepreneurs are challenged to find the right balance for their business of expansion revenue and LTV (loan-to-value ratio). Generally, the same issues of building the right team, identifying the right market, and really killing it on execution will always remain a challenge for entrepreneurs. (As told to Kamalika Roy Chowdhury)