When Sid Yenamandra launched Menlo Park, Calif.-based venture studio Surge Ventures at the end of 2022, he noted at the time that the firm would follow a build, invest, earn model.
It first came out of the gate just under a year later introducing a new company called RegVerse and launching its first product, Averyan AI-powered regulatory co-pilot for advisers.
This week, the venture studio announced its first acquisition, Kovair, a provider of application lifecycle management and integration technology. The heart of the platform is the company's Omnibus Integration Platform.
“While they have many products in their portfolio, Omnibus is at its core and you can compare it to an enterprise-grade Zapier,” said Yenamandra, referring to the popular provider of automated workflows and integrations for web applications that happen to be. used by many independent advisors who themselves rely on multiple third-party tools.
Omnibus also provides support for migration between other applications; Yenamandra gave a hypothetical example of a consulting firm that wanted to switch from one CRM system to another.
While terms of the deal were not disclosed, Yenamandra said Surge had taken a majority stake in Kovair and was “making a growth investment in the firm with an equity commitment.”
Yenamandra, who is also the managing partner of Surge and CEO of RegVerse, will now serve as Kovair's CEO, while its former CEO Bipin Shah will serve on the company's board of directors.
Kovair, founded in 2006, currently has 75 employees, is headquartered in Silicon Valley, and has a development team based in Kolkata, India.
Yenamandra said the first priority after the acquisition was to start building adapters specifically for property firms.
“We saw an opportunity to take a company with a horizontal platform and use that to start developing specifically for a vertical market, and we're going to start by building the capability for RIA firms that want to pull data from a firm, to say a guardian and bring them. into a system like Omnibus and then move it somewhere else,” he said.
To achieve this goal, Yenamandra said a core team would continue to support Kovair's existing customer base (which includes Applied Materials, Intel, the US Navy and the Worldbank Group), while 35% to 40% of the staff of he would be hired as a centralized development team building new products for Surge.
“We are achieving three things with Kovair: getting a world-class platform, access to this talent pool of talented developer team with a deep knowledge of diversion architectures and where managing data workflows is a competency essential and talent is in the region where turnover is rare,” he said.
Increasingly, that kind of talent is becoming harder to attract, especially in expensive environments like Silicon Valley.
“With the advent of generative artificial intelligence, your data is the new gold, and that's fulfilling the promise we founded Surge on — we wanted to solve problems in wealth (management),” he said.