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. 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 also 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 Associate at Cadenza. Prior to joining Cadenza, 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.

Andrew Liu

Andrew is an Investment Associate at Cadenza. Prior to joining, he was an Investment Analyst at Cambridge Associates in San Francisco. Previously, he was also an Investment Banking Summer Analyst in TMT at Wedbush and Flight Electronics intern at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Andrew holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA.

Alex Acero

Dr. Acero is a world-renowned engineer and a Partner at Cadenza. In 2025, Dr. Acero was elected to the National Academy of Engineering. Most recently, Dr. Acero was a Sr. Distinguished Engineer and Siri Chief Scientist leading speech and language technology for Siri. Prior to joining Apple in 2013, he spent 20 years at Microsoft Research leading teams in speech, audio, multimedia, computer vision, natural language processing, machine translation, machine learning, and information retrieval. Alex is an Affiliate Faculty at the University of Washington and a Fellow of IEEE and ISCA. Alex has served the IEEE in many leadership roles including the Board of Directors of IEEE and the IEEE Foundation, and as President of the IEEE Signal Processing Society. Alex is author of the textbook “Spoken Language Processing”, over 230 technical papers and 160 US patents. Alex holds a PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University.

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 (acquired by Proofpoint). Vipul later founded Topsy, a social media search and analytics service that was acquired by Apple in 2013. At Apple, Vipul was a Senior Director and led a team of 250+ engineers. More recently, Vipul launched Together.ai; a cloud platform for open source 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. Tim holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Purdue University and an M.S. in Computer Science from The George Washington University.

Christopher Biettchert

Christopher Biettchert brings over two decades of security expertise, specializing in threat detection, incident response, and penetration testing. He has a proven track record of identifying and mitigating complex risks at leading organizations including Google, Facebook, Square, the National Security Agency, and Aurora Innovation.

Charles Srisuwananukorn

Charles is a tech industry veteran that bring his expertise in AI, ML, and software engineering as a Venture Partner at Cadenza. Charles is currently a founding engineer at Together.ai, a leading cloud platform for generative AI. Prior to Together, he served as Head of Applied Machine Learning at Snorkel AI and Senior Software Engineer at Apple. Charles holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford.

Jonathan Bier

Jonathan is Chief Investment Officer of Farside Investors. Farside Investors is a London based investment management company  specialising in global equities and cryptocurrency. Jonathan has over 13 years experience investing professionally in public equities, working for companies such as Ruffer and Brevan Howard. Jonathan also serves on the board of Brink, a charity that exists to strengthen the Bitcoin protocol and network through fundamental research and development. He has authored two books: "The Blocksize War" and "Reckless: The Story Of Cryptocurrency Interest Rates". Jonathan is a chartered accountant, having started his career at KPMG in London.