TJ

Tyler Jewell

CEO at Lightbend - apps that stay responsive to change

Palo Alto, California

Invests in

Stages:

  • Min Investment:

    $5,000,000.00
  • Max Investment:

    $25,000,000.00
  • Target Investment:

    $12,500,000.00

Work Experience

  • CEO & President

    2023

    Akka applications are elastic services that stay responsive by adapting to any external event – idleness, spikes, end user location, maintenance, or failures. F500 and at-scale startups have downloaded Akka over 1 billion times. Akka is relied upon when application data or users becomes gigantic: - Transactional Apps (embed in-memory databases): Tesco, Starbucks, WebEx, Lloyd’s Bank - AI Apps (inference for AI models): Swiggy, Tubi, ING, CapitalOne - Digital Twin Apps (converge replicated data): Norwegian Cruise Lines, Reflek.io, bp, Volkswagen - Analytics Apps (analyze real-time data points): Booking.com, Westpac, HPE, Amprion - Streaming Apps (process continuous data): Disney, Dream11, eero, Workday - Edge Apps (daisy chain device-to-cloud data): General Motors, B/S/H/, John Deere, Tesla - Event Sourced Apps (track and replay state): Ciena, Walmart, Sky, Gebit - Backend for Frontend Apps (attach micro-frontend APIs): Adobe, Verizon, RBC, USAA With Akka, developers build apps once and then scale through every elasticity barrier without rewrites or downtime. Akka applications guarantee resilience and deliver nearly infinite performance. Akka apps auto-scale while placing R-W replicas in 100s of POPs to be near users. Akka canaries, rebalances, and repartitions application workloads to enable no-downtime maintenance events. Akka recovers, migrates and replicates workloads to handle any potential failure. We are backed by Dell Tech Capital, Intel Capital, Juniper Networks, IBM, and Greylock.

  • Partner

    2012

    Board: - Sauce Labs (exited to PE, 2017) - WSO2 (acquired by EQT, Q2 '24) - Codenvy (acquired by RHT, Q2 '17) - Cloudant (acquired by IBM, Q1 '14) Angel: - SourceGraph (exited in 2015 secondary) - ZeroTurnaround (acq. by Roguewave, Q4 '17) - InfoQ.com (exited in 2017 through secondary) - AppHarbor (acquired by MSFT, Q4 '14) Advisor: - Security Compass (acquired by PE, Q4 '19) - Tomitribe (apache support) Toba Capital's partners are proven operators with expertise in IT infrastructure. Many of our partners continue as active CEOs, bringing a unique blend of market depth and support to our portfolio companies.

  • Managing Director

    2019 - 2023

    Board: - NS1 (smart network services acq. by IBM) - Lightbend (app elasticity without rewrites or downtime) - Loops.ai (operational intelligence) - Archipelo (developer security posture management) - Orion Labs (digital push-to-talk acq. by Modaxo) Observer: - Zingly (rethinking the contact us box) - CUE Labs (CUE configuration language) - Oxeye Security (cloud native app sec acq. by Gitlab) - AppMap (personalized dev observability) Advisor: Yugabyte, Tetrate, Minio, Fly.io. I've invested as a VC and angel $150M across 17 companies with 12 exits (woohoo!). As an operator, I built product organizations and was a 3-time CEO/COO. I am a geek and domain expert in developer tools, dev{sec|net|git}ops, infrastructure, developer platforms, and open-source licensing. I'm knowledgeably dangerous (mostly to myself) in analytics, business intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and systems management. At DTC, I am working on early stage and growth investments. Entrepreneurs enjoy collaborating with me on their product market fit, go-to-market, unlocking strategic markets, building and scaling organizations, and leadership challenges. My partners are enterprise operators and investors who are experts in enterprise systems with degrees in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering coupled with long track records of investing in and actively supporting emerging companies. We invest in disruptive enterprise businesses including Silicon, Storage, Networking, DevOps, IoT, Mobile Computing, Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Big Data, ML/AI, and Analytics.

2017 - 2019

  • CEO

    2017 - 2019

    Leading the passionate and amazing people at WSO2. Founded in 2005, WSO2 is the world's #1 open source integration vendor, helping digitally-driven organizations become integration agile. Brand name customers choose us for our broad, integrated platform, approach to open source, and agile transformation methodology. With offices in Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, UK, Germany and USA, WSO2 employs over 600 professionals. 1,000’s of global projects execute over 6 trillion transactions annually with WSO2.

2012 - 2017

  • CEO & Founder

    2012 - 2017

    Codenvy was acquired by Red Hat in June 2017! Codenvy makes cloud workspaces for development teams. 45 employees and $10M in venture capital raised from Toba Capital and Auriga Ventures.

2011 - 2012

  • VP, Oracle Public Cloud

    2011 - 2012

    A combination of SAAS and PAAS businesses that are offered in a self-service, elastic environment on a subscription basis generating more than $1B in annual revenue.

2005 - 2011

  • VP & Investment Manager

    2005 - 2011

    Lead investments tied to innovation strategies in the application development, application server, lifecycle management, and SAAS markets. Investments include WSO2 (board), ZeroTurnaround, AppHarbor, AwayFind, rule.fm and Skydera. Directed product teams for Java, ERP, monitoring, virtualization, and cloud businesses. Oversaw businesses with $150M in revs. Drove a number of acquisitions and new product launches.

2003 - 2004

  • COO/CEO

    2003 - 2004

    Ran a media subsidiary of Veritas prior to the acquisition by Symantec. We published TheServerSide.com, a tabloid and research community for enterprise Java and .NET with over a million subscribers. Led the divestiture from Veritas and sale to TechTarget where TSS still operates 20 years later!

1997 - 2003

  • Director

    1997 - 2003

    Various technical positions in marketing, products and services.