Augment Ventures Quarterly Newsletter

Hirak Parikh joins Augment as Venture Partner

Hirak Parikh who runs the Monroe-Brown Seed Fund at the University of Michigan has joined Augment Ventures as a Venture Partner. Through the MVCA Venture Fellows Program, Hirak will be assisting with due diligence and portfolio management for Funds I and II.

“I’m very excited about the opportunity to work on a wider variety of early-stage companies through Augment and look forward to working more closely with the local VC and entrepreneur community,” said Hirak Parikh. Q & A on MVCA’s blog.

Hirak holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering, MSE in Electrical Engineering, MS in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Michigan. He lives in Ann Arbor with his wife and two kids. When not busy reading he can be found running around town putting in somemiles of training for his next marathon.

Other Notable Headlines From Our Portfolio:

Our Fund I portfolio company Aperia Technologies has been combating the problem of tire under-inflation as it afflicts the commercial trucking industry by delivering the most advanced tire inflation solution available to fleets focused on driving down operational costs, downtime, and increasing safety. Their signature product the Halo Tire Inflation System could help alleviate these problems. In fact, if this system was installed on all 8 million tractors and trailers on America’s roads today it would help our planet in the following ways:
• Oil consumption would be reduced by 20 million barrels
• Tire waste would be cut by 5 million tires
• Carbon Emissions would be curbed to 9 million tons of CO2

Aperia continues to garner attention and kudos from trade magazines and journals:

In Modern Tire Dealer, Judith Monte, VP Marketing at Aperia was quoted, “While significantly more data is becoming available across the trucking industry, customers are becoming less interested in having it reported to them. The future of tire management is not about reporting data to customers, but transforming data into insights and automatically taking action on them.”

Heavy Duty Trucking reported that 80% of all trucking fleets prefer Automatic Tire Inflation Systems (ATIS) as opposed to Tire Pressure Monitoring Systems (TPMS).