Granite Ventures is a venture capital

Venture capital

Venture capital is financial capital provided to early-stage, high-potential, high risk, growth startup companies. The venture capital fund makes money by owning equity in the companies it invests in, which usually have a novel technology or business model in high technology industries, such as...

 firm with offices in San Francisco, California

San Francisco, California

San Francisco , officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the financial, cultural, and transportation center of the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of 7.15 million people which includes San Jose and Oakland...

. Granite's predecessor H&Q Venture Associates, founded in 1992, was the venture capital investment arm of Hambrecht & Quist

Hambrecht & Quist

Hambrecht & Quist was an investment bank based in San Francisco, California noted for its focus on the technology and internet sectors. H&Q was founded by William Hambrecht and George Quist in California, 1968....

, a leading technology oriented investment bank. Granite completed a spinout from H&Q when the bank was sold to Chase Manhattan Bank

Chase Manhattan Bank

JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., doing business as Chase, is a national bank that constitutes the consumer and commercial banking subsidiary of financial services firm JPMorgan Chase. The bank was known as Chase Manhattan Bank until it merged with J.P. Morgan & Co. in 2000...

 in 1999.

Since its founding, Granite has raised over $1 billion in investor commitments and has invested in more than 90 companies. In 2005, the firm raised Granite Ventures II, its second fund since completing its spinout in 2000, with $350 million of investor commitments.

Granite's investment professionals include: Tom Furlong, Chris Hollenbeck, Sam Kingsland, Standish O'Grady, Len Rand and Eric Zimits.

Investments

Granite has backed such companies as Tumbleweed Communications

Tumbleweed Communications

Tumbleweed Communications Corp. provided secure messaging and secure file transfer solutions for enterprise and government customers. Tumbleweed Communications merged with Axway in 2008....

, Plumtree Software

Plumtree Software

Plumtree Software is a former software company founded in 1996 by product managers and engineers from Oracle and Informix with funding from Sequoia Capital. The company was a pioneer of extending the portal concept popularized by Yahoo! from the web to enterprise computing. BEA Systems acquired...

, Sendmail

Sendmail

Sendmail is a general purpose internetwork email routing facility that supports many kinds of mail-transfer and -delivery methods, including the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol used for email transport over the Internet....

, and Westbridge Technology.

Granite has established strategic partnerships with technology firms including Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems

Adobe Systems Incorporated is an American computer software company founded in 1982 and headquartered in San Jose, California, United States...

, British Telecom, and Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments

Texas Instruments Inc. , widely known as TI, is an American company based in Dallas, Texas, United States, which develops and commercializes semiconductor and computer technology...

. In these partnerships Granite has provided management services for the company's in-house venture programs.

External links

• Granite Ventures (company website)