Aymerik Renard

Based in Silicon Valley, Paris, and London, HCVC is a venture capital firm helping hardware-related founders build amazing companies spanning software for hardware, components/subsystems, and full stack as well as hardware as a service. With Hardware Club Fund II, we're investing in pre-seed, seed, and series-A hardware-centric startups across a variety of domains. My HCVC investments are Alcatraz, Amberbox, Anello Photonics, Antaris, Augmenta, Bellwether Coffee, Bodyport, Caper (acquired by InstaCart), Chef Robotics, Delian, Fieldvision (acquired by BallerTV), Full Speed Automation, Left Hand Robotics (acquired by Toro), Span, and Spectrohm. We also run Hardware Club, a stage, geography and sector agnostic community of highly curated hardware startups and corporate partners. We help member startups scale globally through access to strategic partnerships and resources aimed at overcoming critical challenges common to hardware, like manufacturing and distribution.

Spanning Paris, San Francisco, and Tokyo, Hardware Club is the first community-based venture firm for hardware startups. Hardware Club selects startups worldwide building game-changing products or technologies and help them scale globally, providing resources to its community through a private network of partners in manufacturing and distribution, an online platform, and private events. Hardware Club also invests at early stage in some of its member startups.

Spectrohm was founded in 2018 by former US Intelligence Community officers with the vision to make security screening and inspection safer, faster and more accurate. Spectrohm’s team includes some of the most innovative minds in material identification science, with expertise in radio-frequency (RF) engineering, sensor development, and artificial intelligence. Spectrohm has developed a patented next-generation RF-based technology that provides safe, high-speed threat identification without the use of potentially harmful X-Ray radiation. Thanks to launch customers in the US Department of Defense and the US Department of Homeland Security, Spectrohm’s solution is disrupting mail screening, customs inspection, and border and aviation security, and empowering the use of AI in these applications.

Full Speed Automation was founded by the former Head of Core Automation Engineering at Tesla. Our company boosts manufacturing with intelligent automation and digitization. Our software =V= VITESSE, is the world's first no-code digitization and automation platform for Manufacturing. It enables fast bring-up, rapid iterations, with up to 70% savings on costs versus traditional platforms!

[Acquired by CNH Industrial.] At Augmenta we’re on the mission of changing Agriculture by “smartly” automating the most critical agricultural operations, driving down costs, and improving crop performance. Augmenta is a deep-tech company serving farmers and agricultural service providers with both intuitive and actionable solutions. Our company is the first in the sector globally, combining reliability with scalability. The technology is based on edge computing, multispectral computer vision, and AI to achieve an accurate perception of the farming environment (e.g. the canopy health) and automate tasks, such as fertilizer application. Our state-of-the-art machine learning tech and carefully designed hardware operate in real-time and the system "learns"​ the more it's used by the farmer. A typical farmer can increase their yield up to 15%, reduce the number of chemical field inputs by up to 20% and increase the quality of their field's end-product by 15%.

[Acquired by OpenText] Hightail addresses the problems of creative collaboration and visual project management between teams of creative professionals and their clients and other stakeholders. Hightail began as a simple way to send files that were too large for email and has since grown to evolve the cloud into a virtual workspace that enables seamless collaboration on visual projects from concept to completion.

[Acquired by Microsoft] Avere is radically changing the economics of data storage. Avere’s solutions gives companies – for the first time – the ability to put an end to the rising cost and complexity of data storage by giving customers the freedom to store files anywhere in the cloud or on-premises without sacrificing the performance, availability or security of their data.

Western Digital Capital has invested over $250 million in more than 20 start-ups. We are stage agnostic, investing alongside financial and corporate VCs in seed to expansion stage start-ups. Our portfolio spans cutting-edge components, systems, and software technologies across memory storage, cloud, data center, big data, the Internet of Things, mobile, wearables, virtual and augmented reality, and frontier tech, for the benefit of consumers as well as the enterprise.

3DR helps people see their world from above. As North America’s largest personal drone company, 3DR is a pioneer in making advanced, easy-to-use drone technology accessible to consumers for a wide range of everyday exploration and photography, and for applications using data analysis, mapping, surveying and 3D modeling for agriculture, construction, infrastructure, search and rescue and ecological study.

SanDisk Ventures targets investments across the spectrum of flash storage—from companies with solutions that enhance enterprise applications to companies that develop consumer products. I was heading our North American investing in data center, IoT, wearable, and mobile technologies, and also investigating relevant investments in Asia and Europe.

Courses included: Structured Analysis and Design of Information Systems, Information Systems Applications, Data Structures, Database Management Systems, User Interface Design, Organizations, Computers in Organizations, Technology and Organization, Technology and Security, Introduction to Digital Systems, Decision Analysis and Decision Support Systems, Empirical Research Methods I & II, Engineering and Public Policy.