Venture capital firms in United States

Dr. Russell Hirsch is a Co-Founder and serves as a Partner & Managing Director at Prospect Venture Partners. Russell co-founded Prospect Venture Partners II and III, as dedicated life science funds with over $1 billion in capital under management. Prior to establishing Prospect Venture Partners II and III, Russell was a member of the Health Care Technology Group at Mayfield. He joined Mayfield in 1992, served as a Venture Partner from 1993 to 1994 and as a General Partner from 1995-2000. Russell played a key role in Mayfield's investment activities in the biotechnology and medical device sectors. As an Associate, he participated actively in the incubation of Millennium Pharmaceuticals (acquired by Takeda) and as a General Partner he was responsible for the incubation of Intuitive Surgical Devices (NASDAQ:ISRG). Prior to Mayfield, Russell was at the University of California San Francisco from 1984-1992 where he was engaged in biomedical research. His work, published in a variety of respected journals, focused on important aspects of hepatitis B viral replication. His descriptions of the reverse transcription and packaging functions of polymerase gene products merited publication in Nature. Russell serves or has served on the Board of Directors of Intuitive Surgical (NASDAQ: ISRG), Hansen Medical (NASDAQ: HNSN), Opus Medical (NASDAQ: ARTC), Orquest (NASDAQ: JNJ), AVEO Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: AVEO), Visiogen (NYSE: ABT acquired), Baxano, DFine, SentreHEART, NinePoint Medical, Portola Pharmaceuticals and several other privately-held companies. Russell served as the Vice Chairman of the BOD of Interplast and on the Genetics Advisory Council of the Harvard Medical School-Partners Healthcare Center for Genetics and Genomics. Russell holds an M.D. and Ph.D. in Biochemistry from the University of California, San Francisco and a B.A. in Chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Mr. Greg Gottesman is a Co-Founder of and serves as the Managing Director and Board Member at Pioneer Square Labs. Greg serves as a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group. He also serves as Investment Committee Member at The W Fund. He serves as a Investment Committee Member at The W Fund. In addition to Jobaline, he currently serves on the boards of BuddyTV, Cheezburger, Intrepid Learning Solutions, Nimbic, and WildTangent. Greg is also the founder, current board member, and former CEO of Rover.com, the world's largest pet sitting marketplace. Greg recently served on the boards of Decide (acquired by eBay) and ThisLife (acquired by Shutterfly) and helped manage the firm's investment in Wavii (acquired by Google). He also managed Madrona's investments in Dantz Development Corporation (acquired by EMC), Rendition Networks (acquired by Opsware), Singingfish.com (acquired by Thomson Consumer Electronics), LiveBid.com (acquired by Amazon.com), and AdRelevance (acquired by Media Metrix). Greg serves on the board of UP Global and as the President of the Evergreen Venture Capital Association. He is on the investment committee of the W Fund, a University of Washington-based venture fund. He is the author of three books. Greg is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Washington Business School, where he teaches a course on Entrepreneurship. Greg graduated Phi Beta Kappa with honors and distinction from Stanford University, with honors and distinction from the Harvard Business School, and with honors from Harvard Law School where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review. Currently serves on the boards of Bocada, BuddyTV, Cheezburger, Intrepid Learning Solutions, Jobaline, ThinkFire, and WildTangent. He is a Board Member of Spare5.

Norwest Venture Partners

Palo Alto, United States

Mr. Sean Jacobson serves as Partner and Venture Investor at Norwest Venture Partners. Sean is a former SaaS executive with broad technology, sales and business development expertise. He focuses on early to late stage investment opportunities in enterprise cloud, including SaaS, mobile-first business applications, B2B marketplaces, VR, AI, and machine learning in the enterprise, and industry cloud solutions in the following sectors: healthcare IT, financial services, real estate, transportation, manufacturing, oil & gas, and agriculture.Sean was previously a venture partner at Emergence Capital Partners where he focused on business cloud investments, after being an executive and advisor at Emergence Capital portfolio companies Hightail and Doximity, respectively. Previously he was VP of Channel Management at Cornerstone OnDemand (Nasdaq: CSOD), a human capital management software-as-a-service provider. Sean helped grow the company from $7 to $75 million in revenue and 300,000 subscribers to over 7.5 million. Before his tenure at Cornerstone OnDemand, Sean was VP of Sales and Partner Development at WageWorks (NYSE: WAGE), a leading provider of consumer-directed spending solutions, which grew from $3 million to $82 million in revenue during his tenure. Prior to WageWorks, he was at Elance, the world's largest marketplace of contractors.Sean holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BBA in marketing, finance and International business from the University of Wisconsin. In addition to serving on the Satmetrix board, he is co-President and co-founder of the HBS Alumni Angels, the largest university-affiliated angel group in the world.

Mr. Ryan McIntyre serves as Co-Founder & Managing Director at Foundry Group. He was a Board Member at ThreatWave. He also serves as Board Member at Roli. He started his career in venture capital at Mobius Venture Capital in January 2000. While at Mobius Venture Capital, Ryan led the firm's investments in Postini (acq. GOOG) and Sling Media (acq. DISH). Prior to joining Mobius Venture Capital, Ryan co-founded Excite in 1993, which went public in 1996 and later became Excite@Home following the $6.7 billion merger of Excite and @Home in 1999. At the time this acquisition was the largest internet transaction to date and created a company that achieved peak revenues of $616 million in 2000. There Ryan held the role of Principal Engineer and was a key technological contributor to the company's search engine and content management systems and also led the design and implementation of Excite's community and commerce platforms. Ryan was also responsible for integrating engineering teams and technologies into Excite's infrastructure following the acquisitions of several companies based in Seattle and Austin. Prior to Excite, Ryan was a member of the technical staff for the Hewlett Packard Division at Oracle Corporation, where he worked on several releases of the Oracle Office platform. Before joining Oracle, Ryan was a software engineer at Canon Research of America, where he focused on the development of optical character recognition algorithms. He serves on Board on Two Bit. He also serves as a Board Member at Sensu. He did his BS (Bachelor of Science) from Stanford University in Symbolic Systems.

Mr. Pierre Lamond serves as Partner at Eclipse Ventures. He also serves as Investor at Eclipse Ventures. Pierre Lamond is a pioneer of the semiconductor industry. He started his career in 1957 as an engineer at Transitron Electronics before joining Dr. Gordon E. Moore's R&D team at Fairchild Semiconductor. While at Fairchild, Pierre oversaw the development of advanced high-frequency transistors and the first generation of digital integrated circuits. Pierre left Fairchild in 1967 to cofound the National Semiconductor Corporation (NSM), where he was vice president and general manager, Integrated Circuits. Following CEO roles at Coherent Radiation and Advent, Pierre returned to National Semiconductor in 1977 to assume the role of chief technology officer and VP, general manager of Advanced Products. In 1981, Pierre joined Sequoia Capital as a general partner, where he played a pivotal role in the expansion of the semiconductor, systems, and software portfolios. While at Sequoia, Pierre was chairman of the board at Cypress Semiconductor (CY), Microchip Semiconductor, Vitesse Semiconductor, Open-Silicon Inc., Redback Networks, Verisity, and Plumtree. He was also a director at Mellanox Technologies and Xoom. Pierre ran, on a temporary basis, engineering departments at Cisco Systems (CSCO) and C-Cube. Pierre spent three years as a general partner at Khosla Ventures serving on the boards of Skybox Imaging (Google), Cogenra, SEEO, Avogy, SeaMicro (AMD) and HeartVista. Pierre was one of the founding members of Eclipse and currently works with: Kindred, Flex Logix, Diassess, Cerebras, and Light.

Mr. Trevor Kienzle is a Co-Founder and serves as Managing Director at Correlation Ventures. He helps lead the firm, manages its Bay Area office and leads its information technology, consumer and business services investment practices. Trevor began his venture capital career in 1997. Prior to Correlation, Trevor was a Managing Director of Newbury Ventures, a technology-focused venture capital fund headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area. There, he led investments in the technology sector, including in such companies as MetaLINCS (acquired by Seagate) and Onaro (acquired by NetApp). Previously, Trevor was Vice President at GE Equity, the $2 billion venture capital arm of GE Capital, most recently as co-head of the Software Group. He had responsibility for a team of investment professionals managing 26 portfolio companies. He led GE Equity’s investments in Okena (acquired by Cisco) and RSA Security (RSAS) (successful PIPE investment, acquired by EMC) and co-led its investment in Netscreen (NSCN, acquired by Juniper). Trevor also was co-founder and CFO of Loans USA (acquired by Mariner Finance). Prior to that, he worked as a management consultant at Deloitte & Touche as well as Furash & Company, and as an investment banker at Bankers Trust Company. The son of a U.S. diplomat, Trevor has lived in seven foreign countries. He received an M.B.A. from the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and a B.A. with distinction from the University of Virginia.

The WXR Fund invests in gender-diverse seed-stage companies that are transforming business and human interaction with spatial computing (VR/AR) and artificial intelligence (AI). We are the only venture firm at the intersection of the next wave of computing and female founders. This is the ideal time to invest in these areas. Similar to the broad impact of the internet, spatial computing will be the next way we will communicate and consume digital content. Combined with the power of artificial intelligence, new companies will be created and most industries will be transformed. Also, diverse teams are building stronger products and companies but female founders still struggle to raise money. There is a BIG opportunity here. One study of over 300 early-stage companies, over the course of 10 years, found that teams with at least one woman founder outperformed all-male teams by 63%. Time after time, research has shown that diverse teams lead to better financial outcomes. Beyond our extensive networks, our deal pipeline comes from an accelerator program. Working closely with companies in the program allowed us to create and test a playbook for supporting portfolio companies. We also support entrepreneurs through the early stages of the start-up with broad relationships across VR, AR, investment and media communities with expertise as a serial entrepreneur and corporate M&A. The next computing paradigm is on the verge of growth and early winners are raising now.

Mr. Richard Sarnoff serves as Managing Director, Private Equity and Co-Head of TMT, Americas at Kohlberg Kravis Roberts. He also serves as the Head of Media & Communications industry group for KKR's Private Equity platform in the Americas. Prior to this position, he served as a Senior Adviser to KKR, working closely with both investment teams and portfolio companies. Until 2011, he was Co-Chairman of Bertelsmann, and President of Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments (BDMI.) A longstanding senior executive at Bertelsmann, Mr. Sarnoff served as Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President of Random House beginning in 1998 and became the first US executive to serve on the Supervisory Board of Bertelsmann AG in 2002. Starting in 2006, he established and ran its corporate digital media investing arm, BDMI, and concurrently served as Chairman of the Association of American Publishers. He was named the publishing industry's Person of the Year by Publishers Weekly magazine in 2009. Mr. Sarnoff graduated summa cum laude, from Princeton University with a BA in Art and Archaeology, and earned an MBA from Harvard University. He serves on the Board of Directors of Weld North, Cengage, and Chegg; and of not-for-profit organizations including the Center for Communication, the Bronx Lab School, Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and New Classrooms/School of One. Previously, he served on the board at Activision Blizzard.

Mr. Sebastien de Halleux serves as Co-Founding Partner at Graph Ventures. He is a Co-Founder and serves as the Chief Operating Officer at Saildrone. He served as the Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer at Playfish. He serves as a Board Member at Vittana. In his role within EA Interactive, Sebastien drives distribution, monetization, business development, and relationships with key partners across the division's three business units, Playfish, Pogo and EA Mobile. He was chief operating officer and co-founder of Playfish leading up to the company's acquisition by Electronic Arts in November 2009. Prior to Playfish, Sebastien was part of the team that incubated Nokia Ad Service, a business unit aimed at monetizing mobile traffic across Nokia's 850 million mobile devices worldwide. Sebastien also was an early team member of Macrospace Ltd., a company which merged with Sorrent Inc. to become Glu Mobile (NASDAQ: GLUU), where he was instrumental in building the sales and marketing functions of the organization. He later expanded Glu's distribution footprint in Europe, forged key partnerships with network operators Vodafone, T-Mobile and Orange, and reorganized the company's financial planning and sales operations in preparation for its IPO on NASDAQ. Sebastien holds a Master's in Civil Engineering with honors from Imperial College London. He has resided in Brussels, Bangkok and London, and presently lives in San Francisco.

Benchmark Capital Partners

San Francisco, United States

Mr. Robert Kagle is a Co-Founder and serves as General Partner at Benchmark Capital. He has several years of venture capital investment experience, Bob is a veteran of the venture industry. Prior to Benchmark, Bob spent 12 years as a General Partner with Technology Venture Investors. Before TVI, Bob worked for the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) where he focused on issues of corporate strategy in industries ranging from retail distribution to high technology manufacturing. His various investments are AllPosters.com, Ariba (ARBA), Art.com (acquired by Getty Images), Arteis, Axiom Global, eBags, eBay (EBAY), E-Loan (EELN), Friendster, Gaia Interactive, Get2Chip (acquired by Cadence), Jamba Juice, Logoworks (acquired by HP), Mint, PeopleSupport (PSPT), Potbelly, Prosper, Stitcher, Synopsys (SNPS), uShip, WorldWinner.com (acquired by Fun Technologies), Zipcar and zipRealty (ZIPR). Most recently, Bob's investments have been focused in the consumer internet arena. Bob is a past president of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists, a former director of the National Venture Capital Association, and the Chairman Emeritus of the Board of Trustees at Kettering University. He holds an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business, 1980, General Motors Fellow, BS in Electrical and Mechanical Engineering from General Motors Institute (renamed Kettering University), 1978, Sobey Scholar. He is the board member at eBags.

Mr. Sunny Dhillon is a Co-Founder & serves as a Partner at Signia Venture Partners. He joined the Signia team in 2012 after launching his own location-based mobile startup named Barstool and investing in early stage technology companies for New World Ventures in LA and Chicago. He was previously an M&A analyst in technology investment banking at Rothschild in London, a business development manager at a venture backed spin-off of New Line Cinema, and a corporate strategist for Warner Bros.He is a mentor for various incubators in Silicon Valley and is on the board of Cents of Relief, a charity based in Connecticut that focuses on reducing human trafficking in Indian urban slums. He is also a board member for Next Gen Partners, the Valley's leading venture capital mentoring organization.Sunny invests across consumer and enterprise sector startups, with a particular interest in gaming, consumer, and digital health.Sunny graduated with his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where he was a Lee Hague Scholar. He has an undergraduate honors degree in Economics & Management from Oxford University and a master's in International Relations & History from the London School of Economics (LSE), where he graduated with distinction. He served as Board Observer at Artillery Games. He also serves as Board Member at Drifter Entertainment. He serves as an Advisor at TheWaveVR.

GV

Mountain View, United States

Ms. Shernaz Daver serves as Advisor at GV. She is a leading marketing, business, and communications executive. She has over 20 years of experience building brands and consumer perception; advising executive management; scaling operational teams; and developing global businesses to take companies to the next level in marketing and mind share. Over her tenure, she has worked with numerous companies on a range of areas from brand building to crisis communication. These companies include Netflix, Walmart, Udacity, Motorola, Polyvore, Khan Academy, Zynga, Groupon, Kosmix, 3DO, PlayerScale (Yahoo), MetaPlace (Disney), Red Hot Labs (Google), Truveo (AOL), Savvis (CenturyLink), Orbital Data (Citrix), Indiegogo, and Baidu. She serves as an advisor to several companies including Spritz and Zettata. Previously, Shernaz served as the chief marketing officer and head of investor relations at Inktomi. Under her leadership, Inktomi became one of the hottest Internet names reaching a $37 billion valuation, and received numerous media and Wall Street accolades. Shernaz started her career at Sun Microsystems where she built a brand name for Solaris, the Sun operating system, and spearheaded the company’s European software initiatives from Paris. Shernaz holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University, Phi Beta Kappa, and a master’s degree from Harvard University.

Mr. Sherman Atkinson serves as Managing Director at Miramar Ventures. He joined Miramar in 2011 and focuses on early stage, Digital Media investing, with a particular emphasis on social media, online advertising and new forms of e-commerce. Previously, Sherman was with Austin Ventures, where he was a CEO-In-Residence in their Growth Equity Practice. Prior to Austin Ventures, Sherman spent 17 years as an operator and an entrepreneur in the new media and e-commerce sectors. He served as the Chief Operating Officer of Intermix Media, Inc. (AMEX: MIX), - incubator of MySpace.com. As part of the turn-around team, Sherman helped develop a number of new Internet media properties and also served as the President of Intermix Network, one of the largest Advertising Networks in 2005. During his tenure as COO, Intermix was acquired by News Corporation (NYSE: NWS) for $673 million. Prior to joining Intermix, Sherman served as the Chief Operating Officer of Buy.com and President of BuyServices, Inc. Sherman received his BA in Russian from Purdue University. He also served as an officer in the United States Marine Corps and spent five years as a consultant with Booz Allen & Hamilton. Sherman currently serves on the board of Pointstreak Sports Technologies, Inc., a Canadian-based, venture-backed company focused on the Online Sports Registration and Statistics space.

Mr. Jai Choi is the Co-Founder at Tekton Ventures. He also serves as Venture Partner at Partech Ventures. He joined Partech International in 2006 and focuses on early stage opportunities in Internet, Software and Mobile. He has spent most of his career as a serial entrepreneur and early stage investor. Jai is currently a founder of Tekton Ventures, a seed stage venture fund focused on helping founders build and grow their early stage companies. Jai has invested in a number of companies at the seed stage including UserVoice, Coupang, TasteMakerX, EatClub, DoodleDeals(Plum District), Schoolfeed, etc. Jai was also a founder of PeerPong, a cloud-based semantic search company acquired by FormSpring.me in early 2011. Prior to Partech, Jai was a partner with IGNITE Ventures, a $250M venture fund and advisory group with strategic limited partners from major Asia-based technology conglomerates. Jai has extensive experience advising and working with major Asia-based technology companies on new growth platforms, new business formation, joint venture, and M&A. Jai started his career in management consulting at PA Consulting Group, focused on market-related and operational issues for major telecom and energy companies. Jai received a Bachelor Science from University of Southern California.

Battery Ventures

Boston, United States

Mr. Neeraj Agrawal serves as a General Partner at Battery Ventures. He serves as Board Member at Sprinklr Japan. He also serves as a Board Member at Brightree, Glassdoor, Yesware, Catchpoint, Pendo.io and Chef. Mr. Agrawal was a founding investor in BladeLogic (NASDAQ: BLOG, acquired by BMC). In addition to BladeLogic, Mr. Agrawal's investments include Applimation (acquired by Informatica), Bazaarvoice (NASDAQ: BV), Brightree, Consona (acquired by Vista Equity Partners), Guidewire Software (NASDAQ: GWRE), Internet Brands (acquired by Hellman & Friedman), LifeMed Media, Marketo (NASDAQ: MKTO), Mass Relevance, Omniture (acquired by Adobe), RealPage (NASDAQ: RP), Sprinklr, Tealium, VSS Monitoring (acquired by Danaher), Wayfair (formerly CSN Stores) and Yesware. Prior to Battery, Mr. Agrawal worked as a product manager at Real Networks, an operating executive at SkyTV and a management consultant with Booz-Allen. Mr. Agrawal holds an Engineering degree in Computer Science from Cornell University as well as an MBA with honors from the Harvard Business School. He is a Charter Member of TiE, an active advisor to several local entrepreneurs, and has been named numerous times to the Forbes Midas List, which ranks the top 100 venture capitalists around the world.

Dr. Sandeep Bhadra serves as a Partner at Vertex Ventures US. He joined Vertex in 2017 and focuses primarily on cloud infrastructure, data-driven business applications and cybersecurity. At 21, as a freshly minted electrical engineer, he helped set up and operate India's first WiFi hotspot and felt how transformative technology could be for business users, how hard infrastructure was to operate at scale and how demanding business buyers could be. Most recently, he was a Principal at Menlo Ventures where he focused on investments in infrastructure and data/machine-learning driven applications-my investments there include Platform9, Signifyd, Unravel Data and Clarifai. Prior to that, he was with Cisco's Corporate Development team learning how a market leader uses inorganic strategies to grow and transform itself. While there he worked on Cisco's investments in MapR, Platfora, Moogsoft and acquisitions of Metacloud, tail-f and Memoir Systems. He holds both a B.Tech from IIT Madras and a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin in Electrical Engineering, and an MBA from INSEAD.

Mr. Kevin Colleran serves as Managing Partner and is the Co-Founder of Slow Ventures. He also serves as an Advisor at General Catalyst Partners. He serves as a board member at Chatous and SocialRadar. Mr. Colleran was one of the first 10 Facebook employees and its first salesperson. Prior to Facebook, Colleran had been a lifelong entrepreneur winning many National Entrepreneur of the Year awards. Kevin's various internet companies included StartingPage.com, LiveService.com and PhotoMasterpieces. While in college in Boston, Colleran co-Founded BlabberForce Enterprises, a company that recruited student entrepreneurs on college campuses (called 'Blabbermouths') and gave them the tools to start their own grassroots marketing companies on their own campuses. After college, Colleran worked as a consultant with BMG Music in NY where he launched a music sponsorship company that focused on artists signed to the Arista and RCA record labels. Kevin received a BA in Business Management and Marketing from Babson College. He serves as Mentor at Rough Draft Ventures.

Mr. Jonathan Ehrlich serves as Partner at Foundation Capital. He concentrates on identifying and investing in early-stage consumer, mobile, small business-oriented startups and technologies. Jonathan has deep experience building fast-growing startups. From 2009 to 2011, he ran Marketing for Facebook where he led the company's consumer and brand marketing efforts. Prior to his career at Facebook, he was the executive vice president, online, at Indigo Books & Music, Canada’s largest book retailer, where he was responsible for building the online business to over $100 million. Jonathan also co-founded Utah Street Labs, backed by Foundation, Google and Relay Ventures and Mobshop, backed by Marc Andreessen, Visa and GE. He also spent several years as an EIR at Albright Ventures (now Relay Ventures). Jonathan began his career in Advertising and Consumer Packaged Goods, working for McCann: Erikson and Unilever respectively. He holds an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business and a BA in Political Science from the University of Western Ontario.

Ms. Annie Lamont serves as a Managing Partner at Oak HC/FT. She also serves as an Advisor at Mansa Capital. She serves on the Boards of Acculynk, Aspire, Benefitfocus, Candescent, Castlight Health, Freshbooks, Hometeam, ILS, Poynt, Precision for Medicine, Quartet, VillageMD & xG Health Solutions. Prior investments include athenahealth, American Esoteric Laboratories (SHL acquired), Argus (Verisk acquired), CareMedic (Ingenix acquired), CLARiENT (GE acquired), Harbor Payments (AmEx acquired), Health Dialog (BUPA acquired), Odyssey, Oak Tree/Oxford, NetSpend (TSYS acquired), PayFlex (Aetna acquired), PharMEDium (CD&R acquired), Point Carbon (Thomson Reuters acquired), Psychiatric Solutions, TxVia (Google acquired) & United BioSource (Medco Health Solutions acquired). She also serves on the board of HCA Holdings and is a member of The Advisory Council for the Financial Solutions Lab. She served on the Stanford University Board of Trustees and on the Executive Board of the NVCA. Annie graduated from Stanford University.

Act One is an early stage investor with a track record of success, having already returned total investments in its first fund twice over, that backs capital-efficient companies with demonstrated founder-market fit (an expertise in their industry and the software solutions it needs). The firm was founded in 2016 by entrepreneurs Michael Silton and Alejandro Guerrero, who have been working together for more than a decade starting at the UCLA VC Fund. Michael is a three-time software founder with an exit and a unicorn IPO. Alejandro is a first-generation Mexican-American startup founder who has become one of the most visible and fastest rising emerging managers in America, where only 3% of investment partners are of Latinx descent. Michael and Alejandro’s experience as software company founders allows them to help portfolio founders build scalable businesses while connecting with a network that helps bring in early customers. 70% of Act One’s portfolio companies were founded by women and/or people of color.

Insight Partners

New York, United States

Jerry Murdock is a Co-Founder and serves as Managing Director of Insight Venture Partners. He played a leading role in defining the company's investment strategy and was primarily responsible for the development of many of the firms portfolio investments. From 1988 to 1995, Mr. Murdock was a founder and director of the Aspen Technology Group. Mr. Murdock graduated with a degree in Political Science from San Diego State University and subsequently worked at the Georgetown Center for Strategic & International Studies (now known as CSIS), where he was a contributor to the export competitiveness project. His work was published in The Export Competitive Series: Comparative Analysis of Export Policy, United States, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Canada and Japan. Mr. Murdock is a member of the Board of Trustees of both The Santa Fe Institute and The Aspen Institute and is a co-founder of For The Forest. He is also the Board Member at FuzeBox Software and Truecaller.

Mr. Hugh Crean serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at General Catalyst Partners. He is a Co-Founder and serves as Chairman at Vhoto. He also serves as Chief Executive Officer and Board Member at Farecast. Mr. Crean focuses on all stages of consumer online businesses. He is the former President of Farecast. He joined the Microsoft search team as General Manager and Principal Engineering Manager focused on development and launch of Bing Travel. Before Farecast, he was Senior Vice President of Business Development at National Leisure Group (NLG). Before NLG, he served as Vice President of Product and Corporate Development with Priceline and as Vice President of Strategic Analysis for Citigroup's Advanced Development. Before Citigroup, he also held positions in equity research at DLJ, corporate finance at Viacom and corporate audit at AC Nielsen/Dun & Bradstreet. He is a graduate of Boston College. He serves as Board member at Luxury Retreats International.

Mr. Michael Berolzheimer is the Founder and serves as Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer of Bee Partners. Michael began his career in finance at DLJ/Credit Suisse, working in alternative asset management (private equity, venture capital and hedge funds). After two years in investment banking he was recruited by his lead client, Harvest Partners, to focus exclusively on Private Equity. He completed his first angel investment deal with Bear Naked Granola shortly after joining Harvest Partners, and he never looked back. Michael is known for his empathy and understanding for entrepreneurs-- based on his meeting and overcoming their same challenges in his own startups. He possesses an uncanny ability to network and bring together the right players for each project Bee Partners engages with. Perhaps most importantly, he grasps the big picture situation quickly, he identifies and sizes up opportunity, and sees the clearest path to success.

Mr. Paul Ciriello is a Co-Founder and serves as Partner at Fairhaven Capital Partners. He founded TD Capital Ventures in 2001. His past investments include: iPhrase (acq NYSE: IBM), Softricity (acq NASDAQ: MSFT), Cloakware (acq JSE: NPN), SiGe Semiconductor (acq NASDAQ: SWKS) and Third Screen Media (acq NYSE: TWX). Paul’s current investments include: Springpad in Cambridge, MA and YottaMark in Redwood City, CA. Previously, Paul was an executive at Fidelity Investments in Boston where he was the President of Fidelity Interactive, Founder and President of Proxy Edge, Inc. (acq: ADP), President of The Water Street Project and President of Fidelity Capital Technology. Earlier, Paul was a Senior Policy Advisor at the US EPA, and a US Presidential Management Intern. He earned an MPA from Northeastern University, where he was a University Fellow and a US Public Research Fellow. Paul received a BA in Political Science from SUNY at Buffalo.

Mr. Neil Chheda is a Co-Founder and serves as General Partner at Romulus Capital. He is an entrepreneur. He has a passion for building product and teams. He focuses on investments in internet, mobile, and healthcare companies. Before Romulus, Neil was a product manager at Zynga. He built products features for Farmville, which has since reached tens of millions of users and become one of the most successful internet products in history. Prior to Zynga, he founded and successfully sold a healthcare company that designs new anesthesiology service solutions to outpatient centers. Neil founded and managed a boutique private equity firm to invest in niche healthcare markets. He has also spent time at McKinsey & Company and Kleiner Perkins, where he focused in healthcare and technology industries. Neil received an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA in Political Science from Yale University.

Mr. Matt Turck serves as Managing Director at FirstMark Capital. He invests across a broad range of enterprise and consumer startups. Prior to FirstMark, he was a Managing Director at Bloomberg Ventures, the investment and incubation arm of Bloomberg LP, which he helped start. Previously, Matt was the co-founder of TripleHop Technologies, a venture-backed enterprise search software startup that was acquired by Oracle. Matt is passionate about building communities, and organizes two large monthly events, Data Driven NYC (which focuses on data-driven startups and Big Data) and Hardwired NYC (which focuses on the Internet of Things, 3D printing, and wearable computing). Matt graduated from Sciences-Po Paris and holds a master of laws (LL.M.) from Yale Law School. He also serves as Member of Investment Committee at Digital Currency Group. He serves as a Board Member at frame.ai.

We invest all over North America in companies that have $0-$50MM in revenue, with initial investments that range from $500K-$5MM. What we look for: Experienced management teams, specifically at least one of the following: domain expertise, channel expertise, stage expertise, previous exits. Balanced teams with complementary skill sets. Purpose-driven brands. Platform brands looking to dominate an entire category or show up in multiple categories. Superior product performance. A pipeline of product and business model innovation. Solving a real problem in a $1Bn+ category. Competitive unit economics at scale. Quality co-investors: good partners that are experienced in this stage, category, or channel. Deal terms that make sense. We underwrite deals for a minimum 50% IRR, which means that there’s typically a pathway to the value of the company doubling in the next 12-24 months.

Fusion Fund backs early-stage entrepreneurs building forward-thinking companies with technical and data advantages in their business models. We are actively looking for companies in the industrial, enterprise, and healthcare application spaces and for founders with direct experience and expertise in those areas. We have invested all across the United States and target companies who are at pre-seed, seed, and Series A. The DNA of the firm is rooted in the team’s technical and entrepreneurial background. As former technical operators who have previously started, ran, and sold companies, we know what it takes to build successful enterprises and how to overcome challenges specific to those building technology businesses. Fusion Fund is a part of Beyond the Billion, a pledge campaign aimed at mobilizing a global consortium committed to invest $1 BILLION in women founders.

Mr. Mike Jackson serves as Partner at The Westly Group. Prior to joining, he was founder and CEO of Village Green Energy, a retailer of renewable electricity production to households and businesses. Previously, he managed research in India and China at the Program on Energy and Sustainable Development at Stanford University, where he wrote on the impact of global coal, oil, and natural gas markets on energy choices in the developing world. In addition to his work in energy, Mr. Jackson chairs an internal board for Variety Children’s Charity of Northern California, where he leads efforts to bring young professionals into the charity as volunteers and future donors. Mr. Jackson holds a master’s degree in Energy Engineering and a bachelor’s degree in Biology and Earth Systems, all from Stanford University. He serves as a Board Observer at RapidSOS.

Social Capital

Palo Alto, United States

Mr. Thomas Layton serves as a Board Partner at Social Capital. He was Chief Executive Officer of Metaweb Technologies since June 2007. He served as the Chief Executive Officer of OpenTable from 2001 to June 4, 2007. He co-founded MAPLight. He co-founded CitySearch and served as its President and Chief Operating Officer from November 1995 to June 1999. He also serves as a Board Member at Doxo. He served at Score Learning as the Chief Financial Officer from April 1994 to October 1995 and as its President and Chief Operating Officer from March 1995 to October 1995. He served as a Vice President and General Manager of MicroFinancial and from 1986 to 1988, he served as a Consultant at Boston Consulting Group. He holds an MBA from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University and a BS from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

True Wealth Ventures invests in women-led companies with healthy or sustainability impacts at the core of their value propositions. Formed in 2015 by Founding General Partner Sara Brand, True Wealth Ventures, with General Partner Kerry Rupp, is an Austin-headquartered venture capital firm that invests exclusively in women-led companies. True Wealth Ventures investment thesis is women-led companies perform better financially, yet remain an untapped market. We like to be the first institutional investors at an early stage (usually Series Seed) with first checks up to $1M, and we often take a board seat. We generally reserve the majority of our investment capital for follow-on investments. We look for companies where the founders see an acquisition exit opportunity within 5 years at a valuation of $100 million or more.

Mr. Philip O'Connor serves as Managing Partner at Blackhorn Ventures. He led the company from early prototyping and seed financing, to securing a large strategic partner for an in-field pilot treatment plant. For the past five years Philip has been an investor and advisor focusing on water technology, energy, and bioscience. Philip's interest in early stage ventures started with his appreciation for the natural world. This grew with his first job out of college, working at The Biomimicry Institute in Montana, which helped team engineers with biologists to create the next generation of clean technologies. Philip has a diverse educational background, which includes studies in America, England, Switzerland, China, and New Zealand, and an MBA in Sustainable Management from Presidio Graduate School.

Mr. Darren Bechtel is the Co-Founder and serves as Managing Director at Brick & Mortar Ventures. He brings over 7 years of engineering, product and architectural design, and construction management professional experience to the Brick & Mortar team, as well as over 8 years of venture investing as the founder and managing director of South Park Ventures. Darren is a Stanford-trained engineer and MBA who remains closely connected to the young Stanford entrepreneurial community as the founder and developer of Soma CoLab, a San Francisco-based co-working and incubator space for Stanford alumni. Darren is involved in the boards of six startup companies and serves as a technology innovation advisor to the Bechtel Group, a global leader in engineering, construction, and project management.

CRV

San Francisco, United States

Mr. Rafael Corrales serves as General Partner at Charles River Ventures. He brings operating and founding CEO experience from the world of early stage startups. He has led CRV's investments in Amino as well as two currently stealth companies. He also sourced CRV's investments in companies like PillPack and Airtable. Before becoming an investing partner, he became a personal shareholder in the very first round of five startups: Instacart, Blockchain, Luxe, Webflow, and Clearbit. Prior to CRV, he was the founding CEO of LearnBoost, a company which was acquired by WordPress as the largest of their first 12 acquisitions. His team's open source libraries have cumulatively been downloaded over 160 million times and helped popularize Node.JS

Clayton Associates is a venture capital and angel group firm which operates as a subsidiary of Aviv Financing. It specializes in seed, early stage and later stage investments. The firm operates under the platforms of Bullpen Ventures, FCA Venture Partners and Rolling Hills Ventures where Bullpen Ventures provides incubation services, FCA Venture Partners manages the venture capital investments and Rolling Hills Ventures is associated with the angel investments. The firm as a whole seeks to invest in companies operating in the information technology, healthcare, mobile app development, software and digital media sectors. It was founded in 1996 and is based in Brentwood, Tennessee with an additional office in Nashville, Tennessee.

Mr. Nicolas Berggruen serves as Chairman at Berggruen Holdings. Mr. Berggruen was born in Paris, where he studied at l'Ecole Alsacienne before attending Le Rosey in Switzerland. He obtained a Bachelor of Science in Finance and International Business from New York University in 1981. Prior to Berggruen Holdings, he worked for Bass Brothers Enterprises on the real estate side of this family-held investment firm, as well as for Jacobson and Co., a leveraged buyout company. In 1988, Mr. Berggruen co-founded the Alpha Group, a hedge fund operation, which was sold to Safra Bank in 2004. He is a member of the WPO-Angeleno; a board member of Promotora De Informaciones, S.A. (Prisa) and Le Monde.

Mr. Edward Sim is a Founding Partner at Boldstart Ventures. He has led many seed and first rounds and helped a number of entrepreneurs successfully scale from seed to market leader including big data pioneer Greenplum (sold to EMC), 24/7 Media (public and then sold to WPP Group), Answers.com, Gizmo5 (sold to Google), Moreover Technologies (sold to Verisign), and Flashbase (sold to Doubleclick). Ed has a BA in Economics from Harvard. He started his venture capital career in 1996 with Prospect Street Ventures and subsequently co-founded Dawntreader Ventures in 1998 and founded Boldstart Ventures in 2010. He also serves as an Advisor at Chaac Ventures.

Mr. Bong Koh is the Founder at KohFounders. Previously, he has founded/invested/advised startups including Shift, Retention Science, Freshtemp, Bringhub, KonektData, Mobilocity (Qualcomm), IBY (Photobucket), Zofari (Yahoo!) and GradientX (Singtel). Bong’s venture experience includes Mucker Lab in Santa Monica and Advanced Technology Ventures in Palo Alto. Bong’s first startup experience was with Organic where he joined pre IPO in New York. Bong was also with McKinsey in Palo Alto and Los Angeles and Salomon Smith Barney in New York. Bong holds a BA from Yale University and an MBA from Sloan School of Management at MIT.

Velocity Equity Partners is a venture capital firm investing in early stage companies primarily in the northeast region of United States. The firm seeks to invest in the enterprise software, communications infrastructure, wireless applications, niche vertical software applications, silicon and hardware technology, sensors, process control and applications of technologies to manufacturing processes and industrial products sectors. The firm was founded in 2000 by the merging of the two venture investment groups Velocity Capital and Corning Technology Ventures. The firm is located in Boston, Massachusetts.

Mr. Karan Bajwa serves as a Managing Director, IBM India at International Business Machines. He had joined IBM last year as executive for strategy and transformation in the Asia Pacific region. Prior to this, he was managing director at Microsoft India. Bajwa will be responsible for all strategic and operational matters related to IBM India's sales, marketing, services and delivery operations in India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka. Bajwa is also an angel investor and had backed hyperlocal services marketplace FindYahan, which was acquired by on-demand home services platform Zimmber last year.

Sequoia Capital

Menlo Park, United States

Mr. Omar Hamoui serves as Partner at Sequoia Capital. He also co-founded HerBabyShower. He is a Board Member at LIFX Labs, PicsArt, Clutter, Kiwi and Offermatic. He founded AdMob in January 2006 while in the MBA program at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Previously, he started and ran several companies in the mobile, Internet and computer software industries including Vertical Blue, GoPix and Fotochatter, a mobile to mobile image sharing network. He holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angelesl.

Armory Square Ventures is a venture capital firm specializing in seed and early stage investments. It provides the first round of institutional capital for companies targeting the largest industries across New York State and northeast region in the United States. It prefers to invest in companies operating in the web, healthcare, education technology, fintech, energy software, mobile and technology-enabled service sectors. The firm was founded in 2014 and is based in Syracuse, New York with an additional office in New York, New York.

FusionX Ventures is an early-stage investment fund focused on helping companies build the next generation of cloud-enabled Smart Machines. The investment theme focuses on startups with products that fuse hardware, software and cloud (IoT) that include a recurring revenue stream. The firm help companies reduce execution risk by combining go-to-market experience and advisor network with design, manufacturing, and program management. The firm has a partnership with D&K Engineering, who specializes in class-leading product realization.

E²JDJ is an early stage venture capital fund based in New Orleans, LA. The fund invests in talented founders who are creating novel technology or science solutions focused on food and agriculture across the value chain that improve the quality, resilience and sustainability of the food system. E²JDJ focuses on scalable, high growth and early-stage businesses that promote human health, lower global energy consumption, reduce the environmental impact of the industry, and leverage technology to materially impact productivity.

Chartline Capital Partners is a minority equity investor committed to helping boards, investors, and management teams realize the full potential value of venture-backed companies. The firm invests in digital health, digital industrials, retail analytics, communications infrastructure and food supply chain sectors. The firm does not invest in the real estate, B2C, social, fintech, material science and therapeutic sectors. The firm is a spin-out of yet2Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of yet2.

With 82% of Americans living in cities, and two-thirds of the world’s population urbanizing by 2050, there is a growing number of challenges facing urban dwellers. The Urban Innovation Fund invests in startups enhancing the livability, sustainability, and economic vitality of our cities. We invest in the following verticals: transportation, energy and water, real estate tech, the future of work and edtech, business services and fintech, health and public safety, govtech and civic tech, and food systems

Established in 2016, Brain Robotics Capital is a venture capital firm with offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Santa Clara, California. It supports scientist-entrepreneurs across the board, building businesses based on groundbreaking scientific advances on the areas where it has technical expertise and business experience. The firm works with a number of incubators, accelerators, technology transfer offices, associations and corporations to bring radical science and technology into the economy.