Team

Kumar Dandapani

Kumar Dandapani is a Managing Partner at Cadenza. Prior to Co-Founding Cadenza, Kumar started BitMEX Ventures. Earlier in his career, Kumar was the Head of Data Science at Norwest Venture Partners as well as a quant and derivatives trader at Evolution Capital Management and Cornerstone Trading Company. Kumar holds a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering and a B.A. in Social & Decision Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University and an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania.

Max Shapiro

Max Shapiro is a Managing Partner at Cadenza. Prior to Co-Founding Cadenza, Max was an Investment Principal at BitMEX Ventures. Earlier in his career, Max was an Investment Associate at Blue Line Advisors, Inc. where he focused on middle market leveraged buyout investing throughout North America. Max was also a financial consultant at Deloitte where he served private equity and investment banking clients. Max is a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and Certified Public Accountant (CPA). Max holds a M.S. in Finance & Accounting and a B.S. in Finance & Accounting from Binghamton University.

Harris Wellner

Harris Wellner is the Operating Partner of Cadenza and joined the firm in 2022.  Prior to joining Cadenza, Harris was a Vice President at Angelo Gordon in the firm’s real estate private equity group and managed a portfolio across the Southeast U.S. valued at over $2 billion.  He also was responsible for the portfolio management of U.S. real estate funds.  Prior to Angelo Gordon, Harris was a senior associate at Grant Thornton, principally focusing on private equity and hedge funds.  Harris is a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) and received his M.S. and B.S. degrees in Accounting from the School of Management at Binghamton University.

Kelly Yip

Kelly is an Investment Analyst at Cadenza. Prior to joining, she was a Summer Analyst at Greycroft in New York focusing on early-stage consumer brands. Previously, she also interned at Enlight Growth Partners in Shanghai investing in early-growth stage SaaS and AI companies.

Kelly received her Bachelor of Science degree from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in Finance and Management.

Jason Song

Jason is an Investment Analyst at Cadenza. Prior to joining, he was an Investment Banking Summer Analyst at Mizuho in healthcare and product finance.

Jason received his Bachelor of Science from NYU Stern, with a double major in Business and Computer Science.

Vipul Ved Prakash

Vipul Ved Prakash is a world class technologist with years of experience across AI, ML, decentralized technologies, data science and engineering.  Vipul started his career as an engineer at Napster and Tradeindia.com before founding Cloudmark which was acquired by Proofpoint.  Vipul then went on to found Topsy which was a social media search and analytics service.  Topsy was acquired by Apple in 2013 and Vipul became a Senior Director leading a team of 250+ Apple engineers.  More recently, Vipul launched Together.xyz which is a cloud platform for large AI models.

Tim Tickel

Tim Tickel is a seasoned Security Software Engineer with over 20 years of industry experience and a passion for blockchain technologies. Throughout his career, he has focused on developing robust, user-friendly security infrastructure for companies such as Google, Facebook, Uber, Reddit, Plaid, and BitMEX. Tim's expertise covers a wide range of security domains, such as key management, authentication and authorization, access controls, infrastructure hardening, and data protection, enabling him to consistently deliver innovative and reliable security solutions.