Luke Burns is a General Partner at Ascent Venture Partners, the Boston firm he joined in 2006, where he backs early-stage enterprise technology: data analytics, software as a service, IT infrastructure and security. He was made a partner in 2012 and is a managing member of the general partner of the firm's most recent fund.
He has led Ascent's investments in CloudLock, RapidMiner, Codeship, empow, Sidecar and gr8 People, and sat on the boards of those companies. Four of the six were acquired: Cisco bought CloudLock, the cloud security business, for $293 million in 2016; CloudBees bought Codeship in 2018; Cybereason bought empow in 2021; and Altair bought RapidMiner, the machine learning platform, in 2022. The pattern across them is the one that matters to an early-stage investor in anything: a company with real technology that has to be taken to a market that does not yet know it needs it.
He was an operator before he was an investor. Burns co-founded the e-commerce software company Emercis and was its chief executive until Impressa acquired it in 2000, and spent the years to 2006 at Bain & Company advising technology and pharmaceutical clients on strategy and acquisitions. He holds an AB magna cum laude in chemistry and physics from Harvard and an MBA from MIT's Sloan School of Management, and serves on the board of advisors of St. Stephen's Youth Programs in Boston.
