When Nikki and I came together to paint the vision and begin executing on what we are building at QDS Capital, we were unified by the understanding that we needed a small team of high level, amazing executives who would complement and expand the set of skills that we could bring to bear in supporting entrepreneurs and founders through their journeys to Series B/C and beyond.
To that end, this is first in a series of posts highlighting the amazing team members who have signed up to be a part of the QDS Capital team and share the wisdom of their decades of experience in scaling software, med tech, hardware, consumer goods and other companies.
Our first Operations Partner spotlight falls on Brendan Richardson. Brendan has more than three decades of success in the world of tech startups. He is the entrepreneur in Charlottesville with whom every other entrepreneur wants to meet and he works to generously give back to the startup community in often intangible, but very meaningful ways. Thus, he has touched and supported many companies and founders and his advice, when offered, is like gold.
Brendan has founded two technology start-ups in Charlottesville, most recently Astraea, where is a co-founder and the CEO. Astraea is a revolutionary startup which is democratizing the world of satellite imagery and analytics. The Company’s SaaS platform, EarthAI enables customers to discover, access and extract deep hidden insights from Earth Observing satellite imagery and other geospatial data using machine learning and AI.
Prior to Astraea, Brendan was a co-founder and CEO Everactive (formerly PsiKick) which was a start-up he and his two Professor co-founders (Dr. Ben Calhoun and Dr. David Wentzloff) spun out of UVA and Michigan. Based on the ground-breaking work in ultra-low-power wireless semiconductors by Ben and Dave, Everactive is now the leading Industrial IoT company backed by more than $100M in venture capital from leading VCs and strategic investors. Before his entrepreneurial career, Brendan spent 15 years as an early stage VC. As a partner at Vision Capital and Northface Ventures he identified and invested in dozens of disruptive start-ups in the US and Europe. Today, in addition to his entrepreneurial efforts, he also teaches Entrepreneurial Finance and VC Investing as an Adjunct Professor of Entrepreneurship at UVA’s McIntire School of Commerce.
We are very fortunate to have Brendan on the QDS team!