News & Insights

“Investing in venture is a return-free risk.” -Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital “No.  Investing in bad venture is a return-free risk.”  -Yanev Suissa, SineWave Ventures Where is Roelof correct? What is happening in the industry? How do you succeed given those dynamics?  All good questions. Let’s answer them: The Return-Free Risk Argument: Roelof’s argument is that...

Last month, a court in California temporarily blocked the Department of War’s blacklisting of Anthropic, and we are waiting on another decision from the D.C. Circuit. Rarely do arguments over government contracts hit the headlines across the country, but this is more than a legal skirmish between a technology company and the government. This is...

The U.S. Federal Government is the world’s largest single IT market, spending over $100 billion annually on Information Technology. This spending level exceeds that of any other single entity. Furthermore, the Federal Government acts as a “market maker,” a role demonstrated when the Amazon Web Services CIA contract in 2015 legitimized cloud computing and validated...

Across industries, the scale at which AI systems now operate is expanding dramatically. Advanced platforms are not simply analyzing datasets, they are continuously ingesting streams of information from applications, networks, sensors, and digital transactions. In high-throughput environments like financial trading systems, IoT telemetry pipelines, and large-scale enterprise platforms, processing tens or hundreds of millions of...

As software systems increasingly rely on machine learning, AI, and automated decision making, organizations often hear two terms used interchangeably: observability and explainability. While closely related, they serve distinct purposes: observability helps system owners see what a system is doing, while explainability helps them understand why a system reached a particular outcome. Observability is about...

As business environments become more dynamic, companies are discovering that their carefully engineered deterministic systems are constraining growth and innovation. The backbone of today’s enterprise operations consists of deterministic data workflows, i.e., extensively tested, static sequences of predefined rules and logic that process and analyze data. For example, a simple workflow might be: if inventory...

Today, third party cybersecurity assessments and certifications programs for products and services are designed with good intentions – to provide assurances that products and services are implementing security practices and meeting recognized security standards. However, as valuable as these efforts are, they suffer from a critical flaw: they offer only a snapshot in time, not...

Developing advanced technologies such as confidential computing, 5G, and multimodal artificial intelligence can transform enterprises by enabling secure data processing in uncertain or compromised environments, enhancing operational efficiency, and automating complex tasks. Overall, advanced technologies can help build trust in digital transactions, support intelligent decision making, and drive innovation. However, creating these technologies is only...

At SineWave, we invest in transformative technologies that have the potential to either disrupt existing markets or create entirely new categories. So – especially when we invest at the earliest of stages – we look to partner with companies that can capitalize on the emergence of a future market trend. Businesses addressing a future market...

A guiding principle of SineWave’s cybersecurity thesis is to invest in technologies that can help enterprises understand and protect their systems and data rather than focus on remediation after a breach or address vulnerabilities reactively. This proactive approach underpins zero trust solutions and data-centric architectures. Within this framework, identity management and access control (IdM) serve...

So you’re contemplating running the gauntlet to land a contract with the US government (USG).  What do those vehicles look like and what should you target? First, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) is the overarching federal rulebook that governs all federal contracting.  It is comprehensive AND intimidating for the uninitiated!  (Check out the link and...

Au courant, there are a lot of conversations about the state of government acquisition, particularly with respect to tech.  There also seems to be a great divide in terms of understanding:  startup founders are either familiar with commercial sales or government sales.  Very few have experience with both.  Too often, that leads to unrealistic expectations...

The seminal paper for modern AI, “Attention Is All You Need” (2017) by Vaswani et al., introduced the Transformer model as an industry standard for processing enormous quantities of data. The paper demonstrated how “attention,” coupled with efficient use of memory and parallelization techniques, could enable machine translation and text generation. Any of us who...

Examples of AI use cases on ai.gov point to a federal government that has been reticent in its AI adoption. AI technology and the products and services being offered today mean different things to different federal departments and agencies. Some civil servants within the government interpret AI products as dubious and risky, particularly when coupled...

One of the opportunities many start-ups can miss is that of leveraging government interest in a particular technology that is still more R than D.  Many of these interests are satisfied with non-dilutive constructs, always of interest to investors and founders.  More importantly, they can help bring together real users with real challenges that help...

The recent release of DeepSeek, an open-source reasoning model, has set off another artificial intelligence-induced shockwave. DeepSeek is reported to be up to thirty times cheaper to train than comparable large language models. This has resulted in people questioning prior assumptions about how to improve upon prior performance, and asking how such a large reduction...

Data has become the lifeblood of modern corporations. Organizations are no longer dealing with neat, centralized data repositories but rather fragmented, diverse, and constantly evolving data ecosystems. Controlling data against unauthorized access, modification, and redistribution is paramount. The best way to control data and secure an organization is with a zero-trust security model, which assumes...

The power law, which describes the phenomenon whereby a small amount of inputs generate a disproportionately large number of outputs, is just as relevant in explaining venture capital success as it is in explaining numerous phenomena in the real world – like earthquakes, professional athlete success, and drug discovery. Applied to venture, if you’re building...

As an early-stage company, your team is juggling numerous responsibilities, and the workload seems endless. You are focused on developing your platform, acquiring customers, securing funding, and building a reputation in your market. So why prioritize cybersecurity, especially if your products or services aren’t directly related to the field? And who should take charge of...

Reducing data protection to data loss prevention not only obscures the real problem but also hampers the search for systemic solutions rather than Band-Aids dictated by attacker behavior. At SineWave, we look for data protection technologies that not only prevent intended recipients (a.k.a bad guys) from accessing or corrupting your data, but that also prevent...

In today’s business world, organizations rely on data to inform their decisions. However, for data to be truly valuable, decision makers need to have access to the right data, in the right place, at the right time, in the right format. Yet, managing data is no easy task. Constructing complex dataflows reliably and efficiently, securely,...

Who do we think we are? (Technology) Based on our expertise and market potentials, we focus on four investment areas:  computing, cybersecurity, networking, and data and analytics.  Here’s a short sampler of investments we’ve made in these areas. It’s been oft repeated that data is the new oil for enterprises.  But if you can’t access...

As a recent addition to the SineWave team, I (Dawn M) thought I’d share my early impressions of how we work and why I so enjoy working with this team.  In the process, I hope to give a flavor of how we differentiate ourselves and what we uniquely bring to all of our stakeholders. Here...

We often discuss the concept of data provenance—the frameworks and records that establish the origin of data and track/validate its entire history. This includes identifying who or what created the data and documenting every instance of access, modification, or alteration, along with the context surrounding these changes. Data provenance provides a comprehensive audit trail of...

In days gone by, the CEO and her team could concentrate exclusively on delivering shareholder value, including good returns.  That drove a real emphasis on efficiency and customer satisfaction.  But in an age of eroded trust in institutions and employer/employee/customer relationships, many more considerations drive ultimate shareholder value.  The C Suite “worry bead” list now also includes IP...

You have built a stellar product and feel it is time to sell to the government. You have  set your sights on the federal behemoth, United States Government. You are aware of its cultural impediments and may have even hired a leadership member who has internalized its procedural nuisances and structural deficiencies. What’s next? Your...

Multimodal AI  For more than a decade, we’ve used AI-powered voice assistants as a convenient and user-friendly way to interface with machines. This AI technology ingests human speech and responds in synthetic voice, giving us the ability to prompt machines to perform relatively simple tasks on our behalf. We interact with our voice assistants to...

Selling your solution to the Federal Government is akin to climbing Mt. Everest. Here’s why: It’s a long, arduous effort with unexpected obstacles that must be overcome before reaching the summit. There are many regulations and permits that you need to comply with before succeeding. Timing is crucial, especially regarding weather windows. A great support...