Maneesh Sagar | Founder and Managing Partner
Maneesh Sagar is a Managing Director at Visium, a NYC based Venture Catalyst working with startups to build visionary companies. Prior to Visium, Maneesh was Managing Director at CT Innovations, the leading VC in Connecticut, where he led investments in the areas of information, media and mobile technology. His investments included Frevvo, Keisense (acq by Nuance), Legitime Technologies (acq by Awareness Technologies) NetKey (acq by NCR), Retail Optimization, ShopText, and SmartEquip. He was also played an instrumental role in the successful exits of Premise (acq by Eclipsys) and Perimeter E-Security (pre-IPO). He was also on Founding Board of Advisors of HigherOne (NYSE:ONE).
Maneesh has over 18 years of hands-on operating experience in international business and technology start-ups, having served in a variety of positions that spanned corporate and business development, enterprise sales, product marketing and executive management. Maneesh co-founded and was vice president, business development, of NeuVis, where he was instrumental in raising over $80 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, GE Equity, Allen & Co. and CT Innovations, and growing a 5 person startup into an enterprise software company with over 350 employees. After NeuVis was acquired by IBM Rational (NYSE:IBM), Maneesh earned an MBA from Columbia Business School, where he frequently teaches and mentors students and alumni as the founding VC/Entrepreneurship Career Coach. In addition, he is on the Executive Sounding Board of the Business School's Eugene Lang Center for Entrepreneurship.
Alan Mendelson | Managing Director
Alan Mendelson is a Managing Director at Visium. Prior to Visium, Mr. Mendelson was the Founding General Partner of Axiom Ventures. At Axiom, his investtments include: Sabre, Cardiopulmonary Corp, Cidra, Open Solutions, Paragon Networks, Rib-X Pharmaceuticals, Tangoe, and SPS Commerce.
Mr. Mendelson has served as a trusted advisor on intrapreneurial activities to a number of major corporations, including DuPont, GTE, Texas Instruments, the New York Stock Exchange, Glaxo, the Canadian National Railway, Hoechst/Celenase, and Owens Corning.
Prior to founding Axiom, Mr. Mendelson had a 24-year career in investments at Aetna Life & Casualty in Hartford, Connecticut where he was involved in over $3.0 billion of private placement debt financings with estimated combined losses of under $10 million. For the last 10 years at Aetna, he was responsible for building its $135 million venture capital portfolio of direct and partnership investments. In his last six years at Aetna, he focused its venture investing on the medical/healthcare area, where he made a number of successful investments, including GMIS, Geron, Human Genome Sciences and SyStemix. In several of these companies, he was a founding investor, and in the case of SyStemix also its de facto CEO. Overall the $65.0 million portfolio of direct investments generated approximately $265 million of proceeds. In addition, he was a co-founder of Thermoscan, Inc., which became a $100 million subsidiary of Gillette. Mr. Mendelson is presently on the Investment Committee of Connecticut Innovations, Inc., the State of Connecticut’s venture fund with a portfolio in excess of $60 million. He also serves on the Boards of the Connecticut Technology Council and the MIT Enterprise Forum. Mr. Mendelson is on the Keck Institute Advisory Board and was on the Advisory Board of Battery Ventures and Syncom, two well-known venture capital firms. Previously, he was the President and CEO of Aetna, Jacobs, and Ramo, where under his direction, ES Jacobs and Company realized approximately $200 million on $40 million of invested capital. He has also done extensive consulting on the entrepreneurial activities of several large companies including Glaxo, Texas Instrument, DuPont and IBM. Mr. Mendelson concentrates on the biopharmaceutical sector, particularly therapeutics. Mr. Mendelson has an undergraduate degree in economics and a law degree.
