645 Ventures Announces 2020 Promotions

December 17th, 2020

We are excited to announce the promotions of 3 individuals at 645 Ventures. Please join us in congratulating Alessio Fanelli and Meha Patel on their promotions to Vice President on our Investment and Research Team; and Guerin Schwarberg on his promotion to Vice President on our Success Team!

645 Ventures has a collaborative culture that embraces 7 Core Values* and empowers every member of our team to be their best selves for our founders and each other. Just as we invest heavily in the success of our founders, we also invest in our people and work closely with them to evolve into exceptional leaders. There are occasional milestones that signal the distance traveled on the 645 path to success. At our firm, the Vice President promotion is one of those milestones.

Reaching the level of Vice President at 645 Ventures means that a person not only demonstrates that they can identify great companies and work collaboratively with founders, but also that she/he has a unique ability to evolve themselves as leaders in a high performing institution. We look for leaders who can build and maintain authentic relationships, operate with integrity and bring unique perspectives to the table. Each of our newest Vice Presidents demonstrates these qualities.

We are proud to have Alessio, Meha, and Guerin as colleagues. You can learn more about each person below.

Alessio Fanelli - Vice President, Investment & Research Team

Alessio has been promoted to Vice President on the firm’s Investment & Research team. Alessio has been with the firm for 3 years and played a key role in pioneering the firm’s internal proprietary software Voyager combined with designing key components of systematizing the firm’s outbound model. He has also been a close partner to founders, worked on investments including DeepSource ($2.6 million seed round led by 645 Ventures), Lunchbox ($2.1 million seed round led by 645 Ventures), Cube Dev ($6 million seed round led by Bain Capital Ventures), Oort ($4.5 million seed round co-led by 645 Ventures with Bain Capital Ventures), RentSpree ($2.3 million seed round led by 645 Ventures), Panther Labs ($4.5M seed round led by S28 Capital and Innovation Endeavors), and AaDya ($2 million pre-seed round led by 645 Ventures).

Alessio is a software engineer, and has previously been a founder as well as a team lead at early stage startups. He works closely with our portfolio companies engineering teams, helping them with their product direction and engineering hires. He has also been leading our infrastructure, security, and developer tools research, authoring some of our most recent blog posts on how to help open source maintainers and what the future of “embedded intelligence” looks like.

"We consider Alessio as an additional team member. Even since we've been working with him and 645 Ventures, he has always been ready to help — from brainstorming on difficult product or GTM problems to helping screen candidates for important roles, to even filing bugs he's found in our product. He's deeply technical and understands products and problems they're solving from the grassroots. He also understands the founder's journey very well, which helps him actually add value to what we do as founders. Building startups is indubitably arduous, and Alessio has been a great partner to us from day one."

Sanket Saurav (founder of DeepSource)

In his new role as Vice President on the Investment & Research team, he will continue to play an active role in working on our investments in founders in the infrastructure, security, and developer tools categories, while expanding his involvement in the firm strategy to expand its geographic market coverage. Alessio will continue to work closely with the firm’s engineering team to develop and provide guidance to the evolution of our proprietary software Voyager.

Meha Patel - Vice President, Investment & Research Team

Meha has been promoted to Vice President on the firm’s Investment & Research team. Meha has been with the firm for nearly 2 years and is playing a key role in helping to institutionalize our investment practice. This includes playing a key role in the development of the firm’s investment themes; specifically, The Rise of Citizen Professionals and Application of Personalized Consumer. Most recently, Meha authored a blog post titled The Evolution of Adobe and Future of Creative Software, and previously co-authored The Top Five Myths About Building Billion-Dollar Startups. Meha has also been a close partner to founders, working closely with Slope.io ($3 million seed round led by 645 Ventures) and Spiketrap ($3 million seed round led by Susa Ventures). Meha serves as a trusted board observer at Slope.io and has taken an active role in helping several other companies connect to prospective customers.

“From Due Diligence to Term Sheet to Board Meeting, Meha has consistently impressed our team with her deep understanding of the complex, multi-stakeholder problems we're addressing across the clinical research industry. Our team at Slope is solving a fundamental, yet incredibly esoteric problem in the clinical research space. In the hundreds of conversations I had throughout the process there were less than five investors who really understood the market opportunity. Meha was one of them. I cannot tell you how exciting it is to have her working so closely with our team.”

Rust Felix (founder & CEO of Slope)

In her new role as Vice President on the Investment & Research team, Meha will continue to play an active role in leading SaaS, Healthcare, and Personalized Consumer investments. She will also continue working with the firm’s leadership to build more institutional processes and play an active leadership role in driving equity for women in the industry.

Guerin Schwarberg - Vice President, Success Team

Guerin has been promoted to Vice President on the firm’s Success Team. Guerin has been with our firm for over 2 years, and has played a key role in driving value for founders through our Success Team. The Success Team is tasked with adding tangible and needle-moving value to our portfolio companies and the greater 645 ecosystem. Guerin has been instrumental in harnessing the expertise of the firm, leveraging the collective networks of the 645 team, and formalizing our Connected Network to drive material outcomes for founders. He is key to our Success Team’s ability to operate with a client-service mindset, which requires us to be responsive in helping to influence successful outcomes for our founders. Most recently, he led the firm’s effort in organizing Founders Roundtable events, which are small group thought leadership sessions among founders and highly successful operators. Additionally, Guerin has worked closely with portfolio companies including Squire, Lunchbox, Electroneek, Spiketrap, and several others.

"Guerin has been an exceptional partner to Spiketrap since 645 Ventures joined us on Spiketrap's journey. Guerin is super sharp, helping me to always think one step ahead - something invaluable for any startup. Whether it's prepping us for an important intro, pulling together founders of other companies to share thoughts on difficult issues, or working with us to strategically think through our pricing and sales strategy, Guerin's mind is an awesome asset to have onboard. Additionally, he's just a great human and conversations with Guerin on any topic are thought-provoking. Super psyched about this promotion and very much looking forward to continuing to work together!"

Kieran Fitzpatrick (founder & CEO of Spiketrap)

In his new role as Vice President, Guerin will play an even more active role in expanding the Success Team’s capabilities in supporting portfolio companies with business development, growth equity round planning, corporate development (i.e. M&A and IPO preparation), and expanding the Success Team.

Congratulations to our newest Vice Presidents at 645 Ventures.

Aaron Holiday & Nnamdi Okike

• Core values: Reputation, Patience, Insight, Perspectives, Integrity, Critique, and Evolution