Artico Search Fills Position for Next47
June 12, 2024 – Mercedes Chatfield-Taylor and Sarah Scheer of Artico Search have assisted in the placement of Vivian Cheng as Next47’s newest partner. “A big thanks to the team at Next47,” Artico Search said. “We are grateful for the opportunity to help build a team that will invest in early and expansion-stage enterprise companies and continue to support and partner with founders.”
Based in Palo Alto, Ms. Cheng joins the team with over a decade of experience in the tech industry as both a global operator and venture investor. Her primary areas of investment focus are SaaS and AI. “She is known for her judgment and conviction-based investing, her true intellectual curiosity, and her commitment to partnering with founders,” Artico Search said. “We are so excited to see her continue to shine.”
Ms. Cheng was previously a principal at CRV (Charles River Ventures), an early-stage venture capital firm that has backed over 500 startups in its 50-year history, including Airtable, Doordash, Drift, Dropbox, HubSpot, Postman, Twitter and Zendesk. Before that, she held a similar role at another venture capital firm, Javelin Venture Partners, for more than two years. Ms. Cheng began her career in tech as a product manager at Uber, helping the company expand its global presence and payment infrastructure from 200 to 16,000 employees across 52 countries.
Next47 is the U.S.-based corporate venture capital arm of German industrial conglomerate Siemens. Launched in 2016, Next47 backs software-as-a-service, enterprise and artificial intelligence technology developers. The unit focuses on companies in the U.S., Europe and Israel from series A to C rounds.
With offices in San Francisco, New York, and Austin, TX, Artico is off to one of the fastest starts among boutique search firms in recent memory. Given the billions of dollars flowing into venture capital and private equity investments, as well as the ever-present threat of cybersecurity breaches, the founders expect continued growth ahead. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor has completed over 75 CEO searches as well as partner, principal, and other CXO level assignments for the world’s most successful global investors.
Related: Artico Search Recruits Chief Revenue Officer for Labster
Ms. Chatfield-Taylor’s team focuses on executive-level search for scale-up venture capital and private equity-firms and their portfolio. The team has deep expertise in global software, data and emerging technology businesses. Ms. Chatfield-Taylor is deeply passionate about the importance of diversifying the industry, with a full 53 percent of her placements tracked since 2019 being underrepresented executives.
Ms. Scheer focuses on recruiting go-to-market chief and senior executives as a senior consultant on Artico’s growth team. She spent her early career at Betts Recruiting, a San Francisco-based contingency firm known for sales hiring, where she built out their executive/leadership practice in the Northeast. Most recently, she was at True Search where she focused on a wide range of PE, VC, and growth work.
Finding PE Leaders
Artico Search recently helped to recruit Jess Leão as a partner with Decibel in Palo Alto, CA. “Jess is a successful early stage VC who grew up in one of the lowest socioeconomic parts of Brazil where very few people could afford a computer,” Decibel said. “Her passion for learning new languages and computer science ultimately brought her to Silicon Valley, where she became an early investor in startups leveraging modern AI and Large Language Models (LLMs).”
Artico Search Fills Position for RTP Global
Artico Search recently assisted in the recruitment of Andrea Funsten as a partner with RTP Global. Ms. Funsten becomes a partner on the U.S. investment team where her focus is on early stage investments in B2B SaaS and infrastructure. She favors categories like fintech, manufacturing, supply chain, and technologies that solve problems through the use of data, automation, and AI/ML. “Her investment thesis has a strong bias towards backing unconventional founders, and she prefers to be the first money in when others will wait and see,” RTP Global said. Ms. Funsten most recently served as a managing partner at Basecamp Fund where she built out a portfolio of over 50 companies such as Flatfile, Railway, and TripleBlind. She was on the investing team at Expa and Fika Ventures.
Before joining Decibel, Ms. Leão was at Maverick Ventures, where she led early investments in open source LLMs and AI-enabled applications. Her investments included MosaicML (acquired by Databricks for $1.3 Billion), Wild Moose, Comity AI, and Atomic Semi. She works closely with founders at pre-seed and seed stage to find great early adopters, recruit essential talent, and overcome the daily challenges of nascent startups. Ms. Leão is the founder of The 21 Fund, a $2 million seed fund building investing in the next generation of Stanford Graduate School of Business (GSB) startups.
Related: Artico Search Recruits CISO for Xactly
Contributed by Scott A. Scanlon, Editor-in-Chief; Dale M. Zupsansky, Executive Editor; Lily Fauver, Senior Editor – Hunt Scanlon Media
