For some, like Kleiner and Sequoia, data-driven venture capital means simply tracking how many times a start-up is mentioned on Twitter, or where it ranks in the App Store.
Among them is Matt Turck, a managing director at FirstMark Capital in New York, who has long been intrigued by data-driven venture firms.
"In particular, the confluence of factors such as proximity to universities like UCL, Cambridge and Imperial; the strength of the fintech sector and global leadership of the local digital media & ad tech sectors means that the 'hard tech', data-driven software ventures targeted by the Open Ocean fund are in increasing abundance".
All this underscores the importance of mapping local strengths and support mechanisms, to generate a data-driven landscape within which realistic venture funding models can be designed.
To identify today's top venture investors, CB Insights, a research firm that follows the venture capital industry, produced a data-driven list.
As a venture investor looking to invest in data-driven companies, telling real data science apart from pseudo science is difficult, but it's critically important.
But venture capitalists seem to like the numbers they have seen which makes The Climate Corporation yet another example of VCs moving away from social media start-ups and warming up to more sustainable business-to-business ventures, says Niko Waesche, the author of a book on data-driven business models.
In 2014, the data-driven consumer lending company raised 5 million Euros from the leading international venture capital fund, Flint Capital, which invests across the U.S., Israel and Europe.
The first half of the course will focus on "building intellectual proof of concept" – a research- and data-driven approach to communicating the strategy and underlying economics of a new venture in an effective manner.
Several years ago, Bloomberg Beta, the venture firm backed by the media and services giant Bloomberg, began a data-driven campaign to identify people who it suspected might eventually begin a company.
She's the manufacturing lead in a joint venture between GE Digital and GE Healthcare for Plant Pulse Optimizer, technology that uses GE's Predix software to make faster, data-driven decisions in factories.
