Venu Shamapant is a co-founder of LiveOak Venture Partners, an Austin, TX based early stage venture capital firm that focuses on technology and technology driven services companies based in Texas and the Southwest. At LiveOak, Venu focuses on investments across a wide variety of sectors including Mobile, Software, Tech-enabled services and Systems. His current investments include Veros Systems and NSS Labs.

Prior to LiveOak, Venu was a General Partner at Austin Ventures where he invested in over ten companies producing more than $1 Billion in exit 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.

Venu is one of the founding members of TiE-Austin. He is also a founding Board Member of Austin Speech Labs, a non-profit focused on providing affordable speech and cognitive therapy for stroke survivors.