Tom Whiteaker

Founding General Partner - Backcountry Ventures | Previously Co-Founder IBM Ventures, Propel Venture Partners, BBVA Ventures, Hartford Ventures, Visa Ventures

📍 United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 13 investments📅 18 years investing🗓 Last invested Jan 2024
VC🌍 United States
13
Total investments
6
Early stage
2
Mid stage
1
Late stage
18y
Years active

Portfolio

12 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Investor
Jan 2024
At Unstructured, were on a mission to give organizations access to all their data. We know the world runs on documents—from research reports and memos, to quarterly filings and plans of action. And yet, 80% of this information is trapped in inaccessible formats leading to inefficient decision-making and repetitive work. Until now. Unstructured captures this unstructured data wherever it lives and transforms it into AI-friendly JSON files for companies who are eager to fold AI into their business.
Investor / Observer
Jan 2024
The acquisition process is fundamentally broken, and everyone knows it. But heres what they dont know: while our industry has remained largely unchanged and void of innovation for years, our adversaries iterate at a pace the Federal Acquisition Regulation never envisioned. Were being outpaced, creating a mismatch that now poses a direct threat to mission assurance. Every delayed contract is a sensor left undeployed, a sailor left unshielded, a nation one step behind. Founded in 2022 by AI pioneers and proposal experts from the Defense and Intelligence community, Rohirrim saw what others missed: you cant fix acquisition by only solving half the problem. While competitors focus on just buyers or sellers, we architected the first unified platform designed for the complete acquisition lifecycle. Acceleration was only Act One. We started with UnifiedRespond™, the AI that enables enterprises to control responses with unprecedented security, speed, and precision. Now, UnifiedAcquire™ completes the platform, empowers organizations to accelerate the acquisition process at the speed of need. We eliminate the disconnect that has plagued acquisition for decades. — Unified Acquisition Platform Intelligently connects data, capabilities, and requirements at machine speed. UnifiedAcquire Empowers organizations to accelerate the acquisition process at the speed of need. UnifiedRespond Enables enterprises to control responses with unprecedented security, speed, and precision.
Investor / Observer
Dec 2023
Weve rebranded, Synthetaic is now RAIC Labs! Quickly derive insights from large, unlabeled geospatial, video, and image datasets without time-intensive human labeling or pre-built models. Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) is an unbiased tool that meets users’ ever-changing analytic demands for their perpetually evolving datasets, in an unrivaled timeline. RAIC enables users to find and classify anything in minutes, not months, without labeled data. Simply provide a single example object image and RAIC will find similar objects in your unlabeled dataset and return contextually-related results. You can then improve the AI by identifying the best results through an intuitive human nudge tool. From there, you can run inference jobs and turn results into insights using dashboarding tools or existing analytics platforms. Synthetaic combines unsupervised and generative AI with our end-to-end pipeline to rapidly train and deploy AI models that outperform the speed and accuracy of traditional approaches. Our solutions have been applied to critical use cases across industries, including healthcare, geospatial AI, security, and conservation.
Investor / Observer
Aug 2023
HiddenLayer, a Gartner-recognized Cool Vendor for AI Security, is the leading provider of Security for AI. Its AISec Platform unifies supply chain security, runtime defense, posture management, and automated red teaming to protect agentic, generative and predictive AI applications. The platform enables organizations across the private and public sectors to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and adopt AI with confidence. Founded by a team of cybersecurity and machine learning veterans, HiddenLayer combines patented technology with industry-leading research to defend against prompt injection, adversarial manipulation, model theft, and supply chain compromise. The company is backed by strategic investors including M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Moore Strategic Ventures, Booz Allen Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Capital One Ventures.
Investor / Observer
Mar 2023
Strangeworks is an unconventional computing software company based in Austin, TX. Founded by whurley, Strangeworks is currently making quantum computing accessible by building and delivering tools for software developers and researchers, and systems management for IT Administrators and CIOs. Strangeworks​ mission is to revolutionize technology by guiding companies through the confusion and chaos of quantum computing, making it easily accessible to all.
Investor
Sep 2021
The core of all AI, business intelligence and applications is data — various bits and bytes that come in all different formats. Only when we sift through this data, reason with it and build on top of it in real time does it give way to vast amounts of information and knowledge. Real-time insights are key to the way we live our lives today; the way we entertain ourselves; the way we listen to music; the way we order groceries. Real-time insights keep your BI tools fresh; they keep your ride-sharing app with the most current price; and they ensure you never miss a fraudulent payment. SingleStoreDB is the world’s only database that empowers users to transact, analyze and search data in real time. It empowers the world’s makers to build, deploy and scale modern, intelligent applications — backed by streaming data ingestion, a unique table type that supports both transactional (OLTP) and analytical (OLAP) workloads, limitless point-in-time recovery and a distributed (shared-nothing), MySQL-compatible architecture.
Partner, IBM Ventures - Investments
Jan 2019
At IBM, we do more than work. We create. We create as technologists, developers, and engineers. We create with our partners. We create with our competitors. If youre searching for ways to make the world work better through technology and infrastructure, software and consulting, then we want to work with you. Were here to help every creator turn their "what if" into what is. Lets create something that will change everything.
Investor / Observer
Sep 2017
Taulia is a fintech provider of working capital management solutions headquartered in San Francisco, California. Taulia helps companies access value tied up in their payables, receivables, and inventory. Taulias platform and network of more than 3 million businesses enables customers to execute their working capital strategies, support their suppliers with early payment, and contribute to building sustainable supply chains. Taulia processes more than $500 billion each year and is trusted by the world’s largest companies, including Airbus, AstraZeneca, and Nissan. In March 2022, Taulia became part of SAP. For more information, please visit www.taulia.com.
Seed Investor
May 2016
Outpatient App is a digital health workflow automation system to simplify Medical Operation Logistics and Communications for Military Health Systems (primary) and Commercial Systems (secondary). The system tracks and automates Wellness, Readiness, Medical Tasks, Provider Communications, and Patient Communications. We designed and introduced the first medical logistics collaboration system for use in specialized environments like Military Health Systems. The core technology is a dynamic coordination and collaboration system to automate any type of medical task or healthcare process. The benefit is drastically improved medical efficiency and healthier human performance. Our Advanced software stack includes dynamic automation and AI (including ML, OCR) combined with collaborative communications to drive collective data intelligence. Outpatient App can operate as an approved stand-alone system, connected to wearables and mobile devices, and / or integrated with host medical data systems.
Seed Investor
Feb 2016
A proactive approach to homeowners insurance. Bundling modern coverage with smart home technology, and offering access to Hippo Home Care, Hippo keeps you one step ahead of problems so you can crush it as a homeowner. Learn more at Hippo.com.
early stageInsurance
Investor
Jan 2015
Founded in June of 2012, Coinbase is a digital currency wallet and platform where merchants and consumers can transact with new digital currencies like bitcoin, ethereum, and litecoin. Our vision is to bring more innovation, efficiency, and equality of opportunity to the world by building an open financial system. Our first step on that journey is making digital currency accessible and approachable for everyone. Two principles guide our efforts. First, be the most trusted company in our domain. Second, create user-focused products that are easier and more intuitive to use.
Investor / Observer
Nov 2008
Electric mobility is the smart choice. We make it the easy one, too. So easy that someone plugs into our network every 1 second. Since 2007, we’ve focused solely on building the best electric vehicle (EV) charging experience for everyone involved in the shift to electric.
Experience · 18 entries
All (18)
Investments (13)
Founder (2)
2026
Founding General Partner - Backcountry Ventures
Mar 2026
2024
Investor
Jan 2024
At Unstructured, were on a mission to give organizations access to all their data. We know the world runs on documents—from research reports and memos, to quarterly filings and plans of action. And yet, 80% of this information is trapped in inaccessible formats leading to inefficient decision-making and repetitive work. Until now. Unstructured captures this unstructured data wherever it lives and transforms it into AI-friendly JSON files for companies who are eager to fold AI into their business.
Investor / Observer
Jan 2024
The acquisition process is fundamentally broken, and everyone knows it. But heres what they dont know: while our industry has remained largely unchanged and void of innovation for years, our adversaries iterate at a pace the Federal Acquisition Regulation never envisioned. Were being outpaced, creating a mismatch that now poses a direct threat to mission assurance. Every delayed contract is a sensor left undeployed, a sailor left unshielded, a nation one step behind. Founded in 2022 by AI pioneers and proposal experts from the Defense and Intelligence community, Rohirrim saw what others missed: you cant fix acquisition by only solving half the problem. While competitors focus on just buyers or sellers, we architected the first unified platform designed for the complete acquisition lifecycle. Acceleration was only Act One. We started with UnifiedRespond™, the AI that enables enterprises to control responses with unprecedented security, speed, and precision. Now, UnifiedAcquire™ completes the platform, empowers organizations to accelerate the acquisition process at the speed of need. We eliminate the disconnect that has plagued acquisition for decades. — Unified Acquisition Platform Intelligently connects data, capabilities, and requirements at machine speed. UnifiedAcquire Empowers organizations to accelerate the acquisition process at the speed of need. UnifiedRespond Enables enterprises to control responses with unprecedented security, speed, and precision.
2023
Investor / Observer
Dec 2023
Weve rebranded, Synthetaic is now RAIC Labs! Quickly derive insights from large, unlabeled geospatial, video, and image datasets without time-intensive human labeling or pre-built models. Rapid Automatic Image Categorization (RAIC) is an unbiased tool that meets users’ ever-changing analytic demands for their perpetually evolving datasets, in an unrivaled timeline. RAIC enables users to find and classify anything in minutes, not months, without labeled data. Simply provide a single example object image and RAIC will find similar objects in your unlabeled dataset and return contextually-related results. You can then improve the AI by identifying the best results through an intuitive human nudge tool. From there, you can run inference jobs and turn results into insights using dashboarding tools or existing analytics platforms. Synthetaic combines unsupervised and generative AI with our end-to-end pipeline to rapidly train and deploy AI models that outperform the speed and accuracy of traditional approaches. Our solutions have been applied to critical use cases across industries, including healthcare, geospatial AI, security, and conservation.
Investor / Observer
Aug 2023
HiddenLayer, a Gartner-recognized Cool Vendor for AI Security, is the leading provider of Security for AI. Its AISec Platform unifies supply chain security, runtime defense, posture management, and automated red teaming to protect agentic, generative and predictive AI applications. The platform enables organizations across the private and public sectors to reduce risk, ensure compliance, and adopt AI with confidence. Founded by a team of cybersecurity and machine learning veterans, HiddenLayer combines patented technology with industry-leading research to defend against prompt injection, adversarial manipulation, model theft, and supply chain compromise. The company is backed by strategic investors including M12 (Microsoft’s Venture Fund), Moore Strategic Ventures, Booz Allen Ventures, IBM Ventures, and Capital One Ventures.
Show all 18 entries ↓
Investment activity
2008–2024 · 13 investments
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