Shawn Abbott

A partner with iNovia Capital, Shawn Abbott has a passion for building Internet & communications start-up companies. Shawn is an investor and board member at Top Hat Monocle, CoolIT Systems, Peraso and Reflex Photonics. He has played entrepreneur, investor, technical and general management roles across two dozen technology start-ups in three continents over two decades. His work pioneering internet security as CTO, then President, at Rainbow Technologies (NASDAQ:RNBO) saw the company grow ten-fold in profitability before being sold to SafeNet (NASDAQ:SFNT) for nearly a half billion dollars. In the late 1980s, he established and built the AND Group, which pioneered the CD-ROM locking used on several million discs. He is an accomplished public speaker, having presented at more than one hundred conferences on digital security and entrepreneurism, and taught software design courses internationally. He is chair of theA100.org, past chair of the Banff Venture Forum and on the Venture Capital Association of Alberta executive. He holds an early patent as one of the inventors of now popular USB keys. His publications include a chapter on hardware cryptography in the ICSA Guide to Cryptography. Shawn earned his Bachelor’s of Science in physics at the University of Alberta and has done postgraduate study at the University of Calgary, Stanford, and UC Irvine. Shawn is also an active rotary wing pilot.