The team at Telstra Ventures started thinking about rebranding five years ago, shortly after spinning off from the Australian telecommunications giant that shared its name.
Now, the firm is known as Titanium Ventures, a nod to the strength and lightweight nature of the element.
"We've been trying to come up with a new name for about the last five years," San Francisco-based managing partner Mark Sherman told me.
Titanium resonated with the firm not only because it's "a strong and durable element that's used in cutting-edge applications," but it also represents the "scrappy" entrepreneurial journey, Sherman said.
"What we wanted is something that had a connection with our founders, our CEOs, the leaders of our companies," Sherman said. "All those people are incredibly scrappy and punch way above their weight. And we really liked the fact that titanium has the strongest strength-to-weight ratio of any metal in the world."
Though the firm has operated independently from the Telstra Corporation since 2018, the two entities continue to work closely together, Sherman said.
The firm will continue to make investments in artificial intelligence, software and other digital sectors, and it currently has $944 million-worth of assets under its management.
Looking towards the second half of the year, Sherman remains "cautiously optimistic" about the market for deal making and liquidity.
"What we're seeing from a pipeline perspective is probably among the better pipelines I've seen in the last five years," Sherman said. "With the benefit of hindsight, 2020 and 2021 were probably too hot; 2022 and 2023 were probably too cold from an investment cycle perspective. And then this time seems just right."
Certain sectors — particularly artificial intelligence, cybersecurity and climate — have grown over the past few years, and the firm also sees opportunities in data transformation and other types of enterprise software.
The firm participated in Coalesce Automation's $50 million Series B round earlier this year. The San Francisco startup provides businesses with data transformation services — essentially a data cleanup step that's necessary before using other data management and analytics providers.
One of its now-former portfolio companies, San Francisco-based OpenGov, was acquired in February by Cox Enterprises in a deal that was worth $1.8 billion.
"I think we do see the market for liquidity getting better, which is really good. And we've had some good recent successes, which we're proud of," Sherman said.
