Venu Shamapant

Venu Shamapant is a co-founder of LiveOak Venture Partners and has been investing in early stage Texas based companies and entrepreneurs since 1999.

Prior to founding LiveOak, Venu was a General Partner at Austin Ventures where he invested in companies producing more than $1.5B in enterprise values to date. He was an early investor in and sat on the Board of Directors of LifeSize Communications (acquired by Logitech), Spatial Wireless (acquired by Alcatel-Lucent), Navini Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems), Mavenir Systems (NYSE:MVNR) and Sipera Systems (acquired by Avaya Communications). Prior to joining Austin Ventures, he was with McKinsey & Co. serving clients in the enterprise systems and software markets. He started his professional career as a software developer and engineering lead at Mentor Graphics.

Venu received his MBA from the Harvard Graduate School of Business, MS in Computer Engineering from the University of Texas at Austin, and a BS in Electronics and Communications Engineering from Osmania University, India.