Hello World! About Iona Star and Our Investment Thesis

We thought of using “Welcome” as the title of this first blog post but since the team here at Iona Star have all been around in the IT space for a while, decided on what is probably a more familiar greeting for many of you. “Hello World” was popularized in the 1978 book The C Programming Language and was inherited from a 1974 Bell Labs internal memo by the legendary Brian Kernighan, who was an early contributor to the Unix operating system and a leading advocate for “C” from its beginning.

We at Iona Star can certainly dream of becoming legends, but we are all advocates for emerging technologies and have each spent decades working to introduce them and promote them in industries including financial services, healthcare and retail.

What is Iona Star?

We are an investment fund focused on companies that are redefining the technology landscapes at the convergence of AI and access to data.

Who are we?

Iona Star has four managing partners: Gerry, Kevin, Mike, and Graham. Not to blow our own trumpets, but we have probably forgotten more about the world of data — including creating, delivering, and monetizing the highest value datasets to drive accurate predictive AI — than most people learn in their lifetimes.

What companies have we invested in?

Check out our portfolio companies here. Our portfolio comprises companies based in Europe, North America and Asia.

What drives your decisions to invest in companies?

A few factors drive our interest in companies and our decision to invest. For starters, check out our Investment Thesis below.

Typically, we invest in founders and companies at the Pre-Seed, Seed and Series A stages.

We target infrastructure and applications in a few spaces, including streaming data, data analytics, data fabrics, data enrichment and organization, artificial intelligence and machine learning tools, distributed ledgers, and tokenization. We are also sector agnostic.

In addition to capital, how else do you assist your portfolio companies?

Through our partnerships and by leveraging our portfolio, we can provide access to specialised rich datasets, technology expertise in AI, cloud and integration, and market positioning and growth counselling. We actively assist our investments to achieve PMF and to grow their businesses.

The Iona Star Investment Thesis

We fundamentally believe that in the future successful businesses will be those that can navigate and benefit from uncertainty. That includes uncertainty with respect to their customers’ demands and buying motivations, their technology roadmaps and workforce organization, with changing economic and geopolitical realities, with evolving market and social trends, and more.

Business success will only come to companies that shift from deterministic to probabilistic approaches, leveraging data-driven predictive decision making as a core discipline. A prerequisite to accurate and cost-effective prediction is to apply data science, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning techniques to model and analyze large quantities of high quality data. By curating, enriching and organizing data, companies will be able to assign probabilities to different scenarios and make accurate predictions in a timely manner and cost effectively.

Our Iona Star Network of portfolio investments and partnerships consists of futurists, strategists, financiers, innovators, and enablers that can collectively streamline the creation of, access to, and monetization of accurate, structured and trusted datasets and provide tools to efficiently extract maximum value from them.

We are always interested in expanding our network and look forward to hearing from you via https://www.ionastar.com/contactus.

Also, we invite you to follow this Iona Star Inferences blog to receive updates that will dig deeper into our investment interests and activities, and shine a light on our network members.

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