For most of its fifteen-year history, FedRAMP operated as an assurance regime built on narrative attestation and a perceived gate for vendors. A vendor produced a System Security Plan, often several hundred pages, describing how it satisfied the controls enumerated in NIST Special Publication 800-53. A single assessor, typically an agency sponsor or the Joint...
For the past few years, Silicon Valley has been caught in a fever dream of conspicuous consumption known as “token maxing.” Under pressure to show “AI productivity,” enterprises gamified LLM usage—shoveling massive datasets into frontier model context windows and rewarding teams for sheer compute volume. In fact, massive internal gamified leaderboards at tech giants tracked...
Front model token prices have fallen sharply over the past two years, yet most enterprises are watching their AI bills climb, not shrink. The reason is structural, not pricing: agentic AI doesn’t just answer a question, it plans, calls tools, retries failed steps, checks its own work, and re-sends accumulated context at every step along the way....
“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...
We’re excited to share a recent conversation between Yanev Suissa and Alpha Partners. The discussion highlights clear, founder-relevant frameworks for turning government into a scalable growth channel, along with Yanev’s honest perspective on AI, conviction, and founder grit. Click here to watch.
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...
In keeping with our thesis of investing in cyber security companies that prevent threats rather than respond to them, SineWave is excited to announce our investment in Runsafe Security. Runsafe hardens software to reduce the risk of memory attacks. Because it works at load time, not at development time, it is particularly well suited to...
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...
At SineWave Ventures we invest in cybersecurity technology that assures your system does all and only what you want it to do and that enables new modes of business that might otherwise be too risky to undertake. In short, we don’t chase after threats but rather pick technologies that enable safe operation even in the...
We are excited about our investment in Anjuna, the confidential computing which secures data while it is being processed. This fills a key gap in data security and enables exciting new use cases. Anjuna takes advantage of trusted computing hardware available on commodity chips to deliver a secure computation solution with ease of use, low...
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...
At SineWave we pride ourselves on being able to find early-stage companies with innovative technology and best of breed approaches. We were recently delighted to hear that two of our companies received recognition from Gartner for those qualities. Fluree was selected as a “Gartner Cool Vendor” in the category of GenAI Data Management. There are just...
SineWave is excited to share our Series B investment in Stacklet. Stacklet is the enterprise managed version of the open-source platform Cloud Custodian, which enables developers to enforce and automate cloud security and governance policy at scale via simple YAML. In addition to ensuring at-scale governance and security, Stacklet enables customers to manage permissions within their cloud...
It’s widely recognized that data is the fundamental building block of modern artificial intelligence. It’s data that helps AI algorithms learn, adapt, and make predictions. As a result, a popular refrain often uttered in the context of AI is “there’s no data like more data.” The approach that sometimes derives from this statement is to...
Incorporating insights from multiple perspectives has always been a hallmark of SineWave Ventures’ investment decision-making. At a recent Women’s Leadership Summit at the New York Stock Exchange, organized by Supermomos, I was surprised to find valuable insights from a very unexpected perspective: the world of luxury goods. Pauline Brown (former Chairman of LVMH USA &...
McDonald’s suffered a global technology outage last week which left many customers jonesing for french fries – some were even driven to the extreme of trying to pay with cash. While this didn’t reach the level of a global health crisis, it was nonetheless painful for McDonald’s customers and franchisees and left a blot on...
A Pendulum Shift Recent news coverage of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives suggests that we are in the early stages of a pendulum swing away from such programs. In 2023, both investors and tech companies significantly reduced ESG funding and programs, and by association, DEI initiatives. Recent public rhetoric is awash with calls that...
This is part two of a two-part series. In the first installment of this two-part series, I unpacked the nuances and complications of FedRAMP and navigating the federal marketplace. To conclude, I will explore the implications of this system for both the private and public sectors, as well as solutions for startups hoping to break...
This blog is part one of a two-part series. Software as a Service (SaaS) offers many advantages compared to on premise software for the commercial industry and the Federal Government. SaaS software can be deployed rapidly, you only pay for what you consume, and it typically requires less maintenance than on-premise software. It has become...
It’s no secret. We’re in the midst of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) boom! Technical innovations in AI are occurring at a rate we’ve rarely seen. Companies are embracing and rapidly deploying newly developed AI solutions to automate business processes, improve customer experiences, and drive decision-making. Individuals are interacting directly with AI systems in hopes...
An AI model reflects the bias present in the data sets on which it was trained. Historical datasets reflect the bias present in the historical processes on which they were built. How do we build an AI model that reflects our current values and does not condemn us to repeat the decisions of the past?...
Unlike software development, sales is more of an art form than a rote skill, and hiring salespeople is the least objective thing that most startup executives do. There is also an adage, at least in Federal sales, that the first salesperson hired will be fired for lack of production, and the second person will succeed,...
Venture firms are notorious for jumping on bandwagons. Sometimes they are right to do so, sometimes they are just naïve, and sometimes they are trying to distract from their poor performance elsewhere. At SineWave, we built our own wagon almost a decade ago, and built the first private sector venture fund to focus on bridging...
The recently released “Political Declaration on Responsible Military Use of Artificial Intelligence and Autonomy” is a sound statement in favor of the use of common sense and good judgment in applying AI to a particularly dangerous military use case. Certainly, no one would argue to the contrary, suggesting that AI be irresponsible, biased, or unmanaged....
Every good government program manager or acquisition officer knows that every large mission application purchase should be preceded by an analysis of alternatives that includes build vs. buy analysis. Traditionally, this has meant the acquirer had a choice between a purpose-built technology, developed by either in-house or by contract personnel, or a general off-the-shelf commercial...
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Rob brings over 18 years of experience building and scaling technology businesses, most recently as founder and global lead for Business Development and Sales of the Aerospace & Satellite practice at Amazon Web Services, where he also led the global account relationship with Lockheed Martin across defense and national security, spanning classified and unclassified environments. He recently joined Loft Orbital as their VP of Commercial and Civil Space Sales for the Americas, where he leads revenue growth and go-to-market strategy for the company’s space infrastructure as a service business.
Earlier in his career, Rob was a Principal at Booz Allen Hamilton, where he founded the firm’s corporate venturing group and led teams delivering both strategic consulting and mission-critical software solutions for federal government clients. Prior to that, he was at Booz & Company, supporting commercial IT strategy and cost reduction initiatives for Fortune 500 companies across verticals including Energy, Consumer/Media, Healthcare, and Telecommunications. He began his career as a software engineer at Sun Microsystems, where he designed and developed some of the first B2B e-commerce platforms and JavaSoft application server products, and holds a U.S. patent from that work.
Rob holds an MBA from the University of Maryland and a B.A. in Economics with a Computer Science minor from Georgetown University. He co-chairs the NVTC Space Community of Interest and is an advisor to Space at Smith at the Robert H. Smith School of Business. He is also the Founder of Space Insiders Media.
Claire provides administrative support for the firm and General Partners at SineWave. Prior to joining the team at SineWave, Claire spent 11 years in the education field. As a band director, she managed the operations for middle and high school band programs recognized at the state and national level for both their musical achievement and the infrastructure that kept the programs running. Her experiences as a band director have maximized her strengths in communication, systems management, and balancing multiple project timelines. Claire holds a Bachelor of Arts from Texas Christian University.
Mary Reding is a Partner with over 20 years of experience in government acquisitions, venture capital, and corporate leadership. She previously served as a Career Senior Executive Service (SES) member and an acquisition expert at the General Services Administration (GSA), Social Security Administration (SSA), and the Department of Transportation (DOT), where she led
efforts to modernize federal procurement, financial management, and drive innovation through strategic technology investments.
Mary played a key role in advancing the President’s Management Agenda, overseeing Cross-Agency Executive Councils for CIOs, CISOs, CFOs, CAOs, CHCOs, and Data Executives under the Obama and Trump Administrations to enhance government efficiency and performance. A licensed California corporate attorney, she specializes in SBIR/STTR programs, Other Transaction Authority (OTA) agreements, and Small Business sole source/direct awards, helping emerging companies secure non-dilutive funding and scale within federal markets.
Mary holds a Bachelor of Science from Santa Clara University and a Juris Doctor from the University of San Diego.
Donna F. Dodson is a Partner at SineWave Ventures. Donna brings an extensive background in cybersecurity, privacy, standards, risk management, and applied cryptography to her role as a Partner at SineWave. Donna dedicated her entire 33-year career to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), where she served as Chief Cybersecurity Adviser and attained the rank of NIST Fellow, the agency’s highest technical distinction. She led the development of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework, now used by thousands of organizations worldwide to reduce cybersecurity risks to critical infrastructure, and founded and directed the National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) from its establishment in 2012 through her retirement. As the Department of Commerce’s cybersecurity advisor, she counseled the Secretary and represented the department at strategic decision-making forums. Her foundational work in data encryption standards contributed to what NIST estimated as $250 billion in global economic impact over 20 years. In recognition of her career contributions, Donna received the Samuel J. Heyman Service to America Medal in the Safety, Security and International Affairs category.
After retiring from the government, Donna worked in the private sector, collaborating on advanced technologies and driving new innovations in security. Most recently, she acted as Senior Principal Scientist at Amazon Web Services, where her work focused on security and privacy capabilities, including cryptography, risk management, standards, and assessments.
Donna holds a Masters of Science from Hood College and a B.S. from Virginia Tech.
As an independent director and board member, government and commercial technical powerhouse leader, Dawn brings more than 40 years’ experience pioneering new products and services and leading transformation for iconic brands around the world, including CIA, AOL, and DoD. She is a recognized expert in delivering entrepreneurial technical capabilities and processes to international markets, leveraging unparalleled stakeholder acumen into strategy, development, integration, and operations.
Nikesh Kalra is a 25-year operator, strategy advisor, and investor in Silicon Valley. He works closely with management teams and investors at all stages to accelerate growth, navigate change, and create value. His current portfolio includes a dozen investments in AI, security, and infrastructure. He previously served in senior operating roles at Equinix (EQIX) and Palo Alto Networks (PANW). Nikesh is a grass-roots philanthropist, athlete, and parent. He earned an executive management certificate (MIT), M.B.A (Oxford), and B.S. (USC).
Howard Levenson has over 30 years of experience in big data, high-performance computing, and information technology. He started the Databricks Federal business when the company was doing $1M in revenue and ultimately led the business as the General Manager and Regional Vice President of Databricks Federal, LLC. Howard helped establish Databricks Federal into one of the leading providers of big data and machine learning analytical solutions with over 50 Federal agencies leveraging the platform to find insights into their data.
In the venture space, Howard previously worked with Institutional Venture Partners (“IVP”) in an advisory and investor capacity, where he advised numerous startups, including but not limited to AI Squared, Hidden Layer, Stardog, Instabase, Transcend.AI, Emissary, and DepthFirst.
Earlier in his career, Howard held leadership roles at numerous technology companies, including IBM and Silicon Graphics/Cray, and has extensive experience leveraging open-source technology, cloud, and big data to solve the world’s most challenging problems.
Howard has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University.
Dave most recently served as Senior Advisor to the Director of the Human Language Technology Center of Excellence (HLTCOE) at Johns Hopkins University, focused on frontier Artificial Intelligence technology. Prior to joining SineWave, Dave completed a 32-year career at the National Security Agency (NSA). He began his work at NSA as a Cryptologic Mathematician and was a trailblazer in applying data mining and machine learning techniques to speech and language processing. In 2004, he reached the Senior Executive Service level, as a Defense Intelligence Senior Leader, and from there, he oversaw various projects and organizations within the Research, Capabilities, Operations, and Workforce Support Directorates. Notably, he served as the first Director of the Laboratory for Analytic Sciences, where he led a collaborative effort involving government, academic, and industry partners to develop and implement technology and methods to meet intelligence analysis needs. His distinguished career at NSA earned him numerous awards and commendations, with a notable highlight being the Meritorious Presidential Rank Award. This prestigious award recognized his sustained professional, technical, and scientific accomplishments on behalf of the U.S. Government.
Dave holds a Masters of Science & Mathematics and a B.S. in Physics from the University of Oklahoma.
Charlie is a Principal at SineWave Ventures. Previously, Charlie was an analyst at Syno Capital, supporting investment research, deal execution, and fund operations across early-stage healthcare and life sciences. He began his career at KPMG in their Economic and Valuation Services group conducting valuation analyses for venture-backed companies and investment funds.
Charlie holds a Bachelor of Science in Finance and Economics from Boston College, with a minor in Environmental Studies.
Leah oversees firm-wide administrative functions and provides operational support to the General Partners. Prior to joining SineWave, Leah spent over a decade at JPMorgan Chase, where she held the role of Assistant Vice President and served in multiple leadership and operations-focused positions. Her experience includes field operations, management, and executive administration. She previously worked as Assistant Manager of Operations at a flagship NYC branch and later directly supported the Director of Consumer Banking, helping manage operations across more than 5,000 branches nationwide.
Leah holds a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Queens College in New York.
Fostering digital transformation and enabling enterprises to harness the power of their data through machine learning, artificial intelligence, stream processing and other advanced analytics.
We believe data is the driving force of business, and the ability to harness one’s data and to use it in effective decision-making will become the make-or-break success criteria for companies. This means that it must be easy for non-specialists to consume heterogeneous data and to use it in complex decision processes, both human and automatic.
At SineWave, we look for data ingest technologies, developer tooling for AI and ML, understandable AI systems, analytic workflow tools, analytics to control automated processes, and decision analytics. We also believe that data need be useful in a variety of environments in a way that addresses a wide range of latency concerns. We seek technologies that adapt analytic workflows to accommodate processing constraints, and that support the development of just-in-time, just good enough analytic strategies
Improving network adaptivity and assurance and addressing new paradigms like edge computing and 5G.
We believe that a data-driven world requires dynamic network. Data sources and data points of use are proliferating. Operations are becoming distributed, and the network should be able to accommodate changing distribution schemes.
At SineWave, we look for technologies that heighten network adaptivity and that enable the distribution of computation across the network. This includes software-defined networking, edge networks, and 5G technologies. We also believe that adaptive networks need secure network controls, and so we look for technologies that support policy-driven networking and secure network configuration.
Protecting data and systems and enabling new types of secure transactions through improved software, zero-trust solutions, and data-centric technology.
We believe the language used in the cybersecurity conversation has hindered the development of systemic, threat-agnostic solutions. It is easy to be distracted with looking for tools to combat specific system intruders through deployment of multiple point solutions or after-the-fact orchestration efforts. As a result, the market holds a multitude of point solutions and after-the-fact efforts to orchestrate them. At SineWave, we believe cybersecurity is just one dimension of smart system management. We seek solutions that enable you to know and understand your assets (human or machine, endpoint or network) and their behavior, to recognize deviations from the norm regardless of the cause of the anomaly, to provide fine-grained controls that permit only legitimate behaviors, and to assure the correct behavior of software and systems. This includes endpoint security systems, zero-trust systems, novel access control and isolation mechanisms, application security, code analysis, and software-defined perimeters. We also believe that data protection deserves special attention to address both security and privacy concerns, so we look for novel ways to protect data in motion and at rest.
Democratizing big compute and easing access to heterogenous compute platforms.
We believe in the democratization of big compute. Computers are no longer just for data centers and high performance workflows are no longer just for scientists. Data computation has become the engine that drives business, so powerful and accessible computing needs to be available where and when it is needed.
At SineWave, we look for technologies that enable high performance computing from commodity resources, that enable distributed and edge computing, that support stream processing, and that enable the use of specialized processors. We also believe that compute requirements ebb and flow, and so look for technologies that enable the rapid provisioning and configuration of compute resources.
Maggie Wells is Chief Operating Officer at SineWave Ventures, where she has worked since before the firm’s founding, joining as Executive Assistant to help the founding partner prepare for launch. Thereafter, Maggie led the operations side of SineWave, having served as Director of Administration and Director of Operations before her current role. Over more than ten years, she has built and run the operating infrastructure behind three funds and numerous SPVs, representing over $300 million in committed capital and a portfolio of more than 30 active companies, including Databricks and SentinelOne.
Maggie leads operations for SineWave’s management company and its funds, including deal execution, audit coordination, and compliance. She has managed the end-to-end execution of the firm’s major exit distributions, including SentinelOne, Evolv, Upskill, and Clarifai, overseeing more than $240 million in distributions returned to limited partners.
Before SineWave, Maggie chaired the Religion Department at Elizabeth Seton High School, an all-girls school in Bladensburg, Maryland, where she also taught Ethics and coached Lacrosse.
Maggie holds a Masters degree from Yale University, a Bachelors degree from Fordham University, and an M.B.A. from Longwood University. She mentors venture operations professionals through VIA, a network for the field’s top operators.
Oliver B. Libby is Managing Director and Co-founder of Hatzimemos / Libby, an impact-focused strategy and venture based in New York City. H/L is dedicated to enhancing and accelerating companies in key growth industries that add value to society. Oliver is also Chair & Co-Founder of The Resolution Project, Inc., a non-profit that helps hundreds of undergraduate students launch new social ventures that help millions of people in nearly 70 countries and across America. Oliver serves as a member of the Advisory Council of the Clinton Global Initiative, a Trustee of the Harvard Club of New York City Foundation, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a Milken Young Leader, a Concordia Summit Advisor, a GLG Social Impact Fellow, and a NationSwell Councilmember. Mr. Libby graduated from Harvard College.
Brian Hibbeln brings three decades of experience in the U.S. Defense Department and Intelligence Community to his role as a Venture Partner at SineWave Ventures, where his track record of uniting people, funding, and advanced technologies to benefit warfighters informs SineWave’s investment thesis in defense and intelligence-relevant technology.
In addition to his role at SineWave, Brian currently serves as a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, a senior advisor for Blackstone Private Equity, Chief Innovation Officer for NineTwelve (an accelerator connecting innovators with certified demonstration labs in microelectronics, 5G, hypersonics, space, and sensors, where he also serves as vice chairman of the Hypersonics Ground Test Center at Purdue University), a board member of Whitehawk Ltd., a publicly traded global cybersecurity exchange, and co-founder of the United States Technology Leadership Council. He also advises the Entanglement Institute for quantum computing research.
Prior to entering the private sector, Brian spent over three decades in the Defense Department and Intelligence Community, championing novel uses of commercial systems, sensors, and platforms. In his last decade of government service, he held senior roles including Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Special Capabilities, First Director of the Special Capabilities Office (overseeing $2 billion in resources for Joint Capability Technology Demonstrations), Director of the Remote Sensing Center-National Capital Region (managing $8 billion in government contracts), and Chief Scientist and Chief Systems Engineer of Measurement and Signature Intelligence Staff at the National Reconnaissance Office.
Brian began his government career as an active-duty Air Force officer assigned to the National Air and Space Intelligence Center and the NRO, and was recalled to active duty in 2001 to lead initiatives supporting Operation Enduring Freedom. His government honors include the Joint Meritorious Service Medal, a certificate of achievement from the Director of the CIA, and the NRO Silver Medal. Brian’s work has been featured in two books on defense innovation, Deep State (2013) and Riding the Monster (2021).
Brian holds a Master’s in Physics from the Air Force Institute of Technology and a Bachelor’s in Physics from the United States Air Force Academy, where his research earned him an Air Force Invention Award and a U.S. patent for pulsed power semiconductor switches.
Patricia Muoio is a Senior Advisor at SineWave Ventures, having served as a Venture Partner in Fund I and a Partner in Funds II and III, where she led and managed numerous portfolio companies and investments. In her role as Senior Advisor, Pat assesses emerging technologies across cyber security and data processing, contributes to the creation of SineWave’s investment thesis, and participates in fund strategy development and management processes.
Pat is a former Senior Executive at the National Security Agency. In her last role at the Agency, she served as Chief of the Trusted Systems Research Group and led research efforts on a number of cyber security technologies such as cryptography, secure wireless, secure operating systems, and cyber analytics. She also served as ODNI Science and Technology Lead for Cyber and spearheaded the work on the Federal Cybersecurity Research Plan. Pat has led a variety of technical activities in data processing and computing.
Pat holds a Doctor of Philosophy from Yale University and a Bachelor of Arts from Fordham University, both in Philosophy.
Yanev has spent his career investing in dozens of early-stage investments both the private and public sectors. As the Founder and Managing Partner of SineWave Ventures, Yanev is at the forefront of helping entrepreneurs build exciting new technology solutions. Yanev has spent over a decade investing with some of the top venture firms in the industry to help commercial technologies navigate, partner, and implement their products across multiple industry sectors. He is a strong champion of an ecosystem-based path to success, bringing technology partners in the commercial and public sectors together to help accelerate the growth and success of early-stage companies.
Prior to SineWave, Yanev was an investor at New Enterprise Associates (NEA), the largest venture capital firm in the world, with over $18 billion in assets under management. At NEA, Yanev sourced, managed, and helped advise dozens of early-stage companies. He also helped the NEA portfolio navigate the public sector, resulting in millions of dollars of revenue.
Before joining NEA, Yanev was a Senior Investment Officer under both the Bush and Obama Administrations, where he focused on investing in new cutting-edge technologies on the cusp of commercialization. He was the first employee hired to build the Federal Loan Program, which during his tenure, grew to become a ~$150 billion investment vehicle.
Yanev was awarded both the Kauffman Fellowship (for venture) and the Presidential Management Fellowship (for public service), providing him with an extensive network of relationships across both the private and public sectors. He has also been a Heymann Fellow, Kennedy Fellow, Cravath Fellow, and Presidential Leadership Fellow.
Yanev holds degrees from Yale University (Bachelor of Arts, Magna Cum Laude), Harvard Law School (Juris Doctor), Oxford Saïd School of Business (Master of Business Administration, Distinction, Christ Church), and Sydney Law School (Master’s degree, Distinction).
