Investor / VCSilicon Valley / Bay Area

N47

Investor / VC · Corporate VC · Palo Alto, CA

Palo Alto CA (+ Berlin, Munich, London, Tel Aviv, Paris). Independent venture firm backed by Siemens (name references Siemens founding year 1847). Founded 2016. Leads Series A/B in enterprise software, AI/ML, dev tools, cybersecurity, deep tech, industrial tech. Partners: TJ Rylander (IQT Managing Partner 10yr → next47 GP; led IQT West Coast; investments include FireEye, Cloudera, Pure Storage, Cloudant, Platfora), Lak Ananth (Global Managing Partner). ~247 companies invested. 16 unicorns including Verkada ($3.5B), Skydio (autonomous drones). Evergreen structure. Brings Siemens global customer ecosystem to portfolio without strategic control constraints. $2-10M typical check. Co-investors: Menlo Ventures, Insight Partners.

Founded

2016

Region

Silicon Valley / Bay Area

Portfolio

Groq

People

T.J. Rylander

About Silicon Valley

Before venture capital and chip startups, the region was seeded by government-funded and corporate research — Stanford Research Institute (SRI) did defense-funded applied research there from the 1940s on, and Xerox PARC, decades later, quietly invented the graphical interface and Ethernet inside a copier company's research lab. Silicon Valley is a string of towns down the peninsula between San Francisco and San Jose, named for the semiconductor firms — Fairchild, Intel — that came out of that same research culture, with Sun Microsystems later carrying the workstation-and-networking era forward before software and then AI layered on top. Stanford anchors it and UC Berkeley sits across the bay. What the region chose to build shifted with each era without ever fully leaving the last one behind — chip design, enterprise software, and frontier AI labs still operate there, often within a few miles of each other.

Region Stats

Total firms 194

VC / investors 63

Companies 115

Universities 16

Known For

Software

Semiconductors