Former Qualcomm Executive Brings Vast Experience in Driving Operational Growth to Portfolio of AI Startups

SAN DIEGO—Dec. 18, 2019 Analytics Ventures, a fund dedicated to creating and building venture companies that harness the power of artificial intelligence (AI), announced today that Rick Valencia has joined the Analytics Ventures leadership team, taking on the role of operating partner. Mr. Valencia’s primary function will be to help Analytics Ventures-backed companies transition from successful startups to independent, fast-growth technology companies.

“Rick Valencia is an astute investor, entrepreneur and diligent operations executive capable of rapidly scaling ventures with exceptional technology and early traction,” said Navid Alipour, managing partner at Analytics Ventures. “His technical and operational acumen in combination with his vast network of business and technology relationships will be key to the future success of our ventures.”

Before joining Analytics Ventures, Mr. Valencia was an SVP at Qualcomm and served as President of Qualcomm Life, Inc. after he spearheaded its formation in 2012. As President of Qualcomm Life, Mr. Valencia was also responsible for overseeing Qualcomm’s healthcare venture funds, dRx Capital and Qualcomm Life Fund. Prior to founding Qualcomm Life, Rick founded ProfitLine, Inc., a telecommunications service management provider, and served as Chief Executive Officer from 1992 until the sale of the company in 2009. Rick is also on the Board of Directors of Tandem Diabetes Care, (NASDAQ: TNDM) and is the Executive Chairman of TrekIT Health.

“Having successfully launched multiple AI companies over the past two years with their venture studio model, I feel that Analytics Ventures has a proven approach to leverage the power of AI for company formation across multiple industry verticals,” said Mr. Valencia. “I am excited to join this team of visionary business leaders and exceptional artificial intelligence scientists and look forward to being a catalyst for operational excellence and growth for our venture companies.”

Mr. Valencia’s initial focus as operating partner at Analytics Ventures will be to assist portfolio company, Kazuhm, in commercializing its innovative hybrid compute offering by assuming the role of executive chairman and interim CEO.  Kazuhm is an IT technology company enabling next-generation hybrid computing and has succeeded in building an enterprise-grade compute platform that allows application and hardware providers to let their users process more data faster, more securely, and at a lower overall cost. They do this by intelligently unifying a company’s existing, yet underutilized, enterprise compute resources, including desktops, servers, and cloud. He will take on this role with the objective to build out and scale Kazuhm’s operational framework to address the growing demand from enterprise customers.