Angel Investors Directory

Chris is the Founder & CEO of SignalFire, an early stage venture capital fund. He focuses on investments in consumer Internet, software and mobile with particular emphasis on seed stage investments and working with Entrepreneurs-In-Residence to launch new businesses. Previously, Chris was a Partner with General Catalyst Partners where he led the firm's successful seed investment activities and served as a Venture Partner on the firm's main fund. Previously, Chris was a Vice President with Bessemer Venture Partners where he led investments in digital media & mobile companies. Prior to BVP, he was a consultant with Bain & Co where he advised on large scale technology buyouts. Prior to Bain, Chris spearheaded the successful turnaround of Skybitz, a wireless enabled SaaS company, where he led Product Management, Finance & Business Development. Earlier in his career, Chris founded an investment advisory firm for angel investors & private equity funds and served as a Venture Advisor to an early stage venture capital fund where he led investments in SkyBitz and Applied Semantics (acquired by Google). He started his career on Wall Street in the private equity group of Cowen & Company. Chris received a BA in International Relations & Business from Tufts University & the Fletcher School of Diplomacy. He has been published in Harvard Business Review, Institutional Investor, The Journal of Private Equity and other leading publications.

Drew Volpe is an investor, entrepreneur, and technologist with a deep experience in search, machine learning, sensors, and mobile technologies. He was the founding VP of Product Development for Semantic Machines, the stealthy AI startup backed by $21m from Bain and General Catalyst. Drew was previously co-founder/CTO of Locately and lead the development of Locately's location-based mobile market research platform from inception through the company’s successful acquisition by SMG. Prior to Locately, Drew was Director of Product Development at Endeca Technologies, a pioneer in search and unstructured database systems, acquired by Oracle for $1.1 billion. Drew is an active speaker and mentor for startups at MassChallenge, MIT, Harvard, and elsewhere. Drew holds an AB in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Edward Lando is the founder of Pareto Holdings. He previously worked at Horizons School of Technology as a co-founder. Edward Lando attended the Wharton School.

Garrett is the founder of Expa.com, a startup studio that works with founders to develop and launch new products. Expa focuses on product strategy, system design, and user experience. Garrett founded Uber in 2009, to help people easily request car service via a mobile app. Uber now provides on-demand car service in over 600 cities worldwide. Garrett previously co-founded StumbleUpon in 2002, growing the company to over 25M registered users and profitability as founding CEO. Garrett completed his Masters in Software Engineering at the University of Calgary, where he researched collaborative systems, evolutionary algorithms and information retrieval. He is also a 2007 recipient of MIT Technology Review’s TR35 award. Specialties: startups, product strategy, systems design, user experience

Before focusing on institutional investing, Joe co-founded Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR) a global software company known for its work in defense and other industries, as well as for providing the platform to run the COVID-19 common operating picture for key decision makers in over 35 countries. After Palantir, he founded and remains as Chairman of both Addepar, which has over $4 trillion USD on its wealth management technology platform, and OpenGov, which provides software for over 2,000 municipalities and state agencies. More recently, he is also a co-founder of Affinity, Epirus, Resilience Bio, and other mission-driven technology companies, which he continues to create with his team out of the 8VC Build program.

Peter is Co-Founder of Lux Capital and focuses on investments in technology and energy. Peter began his career at Lehman Brothers, where he worked in the Firm's top-ranked Equity Research group. In 2000, he co-founded Lux Capital. In 2003, Peter led the spin-off of Lux Research. As founding CEO, he helped build Lux Research into the leading emerging technology research firm. Peter launched the publicly-listed Lux Nanotech Index (AMEX: LUXNI) and the $150 million PowerShares Lux Nanotech Portfolio (NYSE: PXN). Peter manages Lux Capital's investments in Accelergy, Angstrom Publishing, Auris, Everspin Technologies, G2X Energy, Gridco Systems, Lux Research, Luxtera, Matterport, SiBEAM (acquired by NASDAQ: SIMG), and Transphorm. He was a Chancellor's Scholar and graduated cum laude from Syracuse University's Newhouse School. Peter was the Founding President of Syracuse's first venture organization, Future Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs. He has been an invited guest on CNBC and Bloomberg TV, and lecturer and panelist at Columbia, Cornell, MIT, Stanford, Yale, and the National Science Foundation. Peter also co-founded Young Wall Street, a charitable organization supporting youth-related causes in New York City, and serves as a mentor to Imagine K12 in Palo Alto.

Alex Kolicich is a Founding Partner at 8VC. Prior to joining 8VC, Alex was a Sr. Partner at Formation 8. Alex has also worked with Peter Thiel as a Principal at Mithril Capital Management, a growth-stage venture fund, where he helped lead investments in AppDirect, C2FO, and Helion Energy. Preceding his venture career, Alex worked as an engineer and early-product advisor at Clarium, Palantir, and Google. He was an early member of the Clarium Capital quantitative engineering team (with Joe Lonsdale) and a close advisor/collaborator with the early Palantir team; advising on product design and contributing to the product. At Google Research, Alex worked on Google Street Views before and during the launch. Preceding Street-Views, also at Google, he worked on the development and launch of the Google Checkout product. Alex holds a B.SE. degree from the University of Waterloo and an MA from the University of Toronto.

Bhaskar Ghosh (“BG”) is the CTO at 8VC, having initially joined the company as an Advisor in December 2015. Since receiving his PhD in Computer Science from Yale, BG has had a distinguished career in Silicon Valley, working for 20+ years in technology leadership in diverse domains including enterprise data and web infrastructure, digital advertising, social networks, and consumer fintech. Previously, he ran technology at Nerdwallet as VP of Engineering, helped build the teams and back-ends that helped fuel LinkedIn’s meteoric growth as its Head of Data Engineering, and led engineering for the pioneering Yahoo! Right Media Display Advertising Exchange. BG built his deep technology and data chops developing RDMBS kernels at top enterprise data-platform companies like Oracle and Informix. At 8VC, BG is excited to work with the entrepreneurs and leaders in our portfolio as a virtual CTO, and in finding the next big investment idea across technology domains.

Chad Byers is the Co-Founder and General Partner at Susa Ventures, where he focuses on investments in marketplaces, fintech, and healthcare. Chad led Susa’s investments in Robinhood, Andela, Newfront Insurance, Mux, Viz, Sundae Homes, and Stord. Raised in Silicon Valley, Chad was exposed to entrepreneurship and venture capital at an early age. He was named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 for VC in 2015. Prior to Susa Ventures, Chad was the senior director of platform at Integrate.com and held various marketing and product roles at Silver Spring Networks, Bloom Energy, and Electronic Arts. Chad chased his love for skiing, mountains, and the outdoors to Boulder, Colorado where he mostly did those things but also received a bachelor’s degree in Environmental Science.

Christopher Manning is the inaugural Thomas M. Siebel Professor in Machine Learning in the Departments of Computer Science and Linguistics at Stanford University, Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL), and an Associate Director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). His research goal is computers that can intelligently process, understand, and generate human language. Manning is the most-cited researcher within NLP, with best paper awards at ACL, Coling, EMNLP, and CHI and well-known work on applying deep neural networks to NLP, including neural machine translation, parsing, sentiment analysis, natural language inference, question answering, and summarization. He founded the Stanford NLP group and manages development of the Stanford CoreNLP and Stanza software.

After graduating with a masters degree from MIT’s Media Lab in 1995, David co-founded Firefly, an early pioneer in personalization and privacy technology. Firefly was acquired by Microsoft in 1998 where the company’s flagship product became the Microsoft Passport, the web’s first unified authentication and identity platform. After Firefly, David co-founded PeoplePC, a company dedicated to simplifying the process of joining the online world. PeoplePC served over 600,000 individual subscribers as well as Fortune 100 corporations such as Ford Motor Company, Vivendi Universal and Delta Air Lines. PeoplePC went public in 2001 and was acquired by Earthlink in 2002. In 2005, David co-founded SpotRunner, a Los Angeles-based technology company that worked to revolutionize the way advertising was created, planned, bought and sold.

Deena Shakir is a Partner at Lux Capital, where she invests in transformative technologies improving lives and livelihoods. Her investments span stages and sectors, and include women’s health (Maven Clinic, Alife, Gameto, Adyn), digital health infrastructure (SteadyMD, H1, AllStripes, Everly Health), health equity (Waymark, Galileo, Miga), foodtech (Shiru), and fintech (Mos, Ramp, Neo.tax). Above all, she seeks out extraordinary, mission-driven founders. Prior to Lux, Deena was a Partner at GV (formerly Google Ventures), led product partnerships at Google for health, search, and AI/ML, and directed social impact investments at Google.org. Deena also served as a Presidential Management Fellow at The U.S. Department of State under Secretary Clinton, where she helped launch President Obama’s first Global Entrepreneurship Summit.

Douglas Benowitz is a Principal of Colle Capital Partners LP, an opportunistic, early stage technology venture fund.  He focuses on sourcing and conducting diligence on seed and early stage investment opportunities. Douglas joined Colle from BlackRock where he served as an Investment Strategist. He was recognized with the BlackRock Principles Award for Innovation for his work in developing new predictive portfolio performance modeling and allocation optimization techniques as well as for making significant strides in process automation. Douglas received a B.S.B.A in Finance with a Second Major in Classical History from Washington University in St. Louis in 2014. Douglas holds a black belt in Tae Kwon Do and taught martial arts in both high school and college.

Drew is a founding partner of 8VC. He focuses on investments across various stages and sectors including vertical software, health delivery, and biomanufacturing. He is also a founding Board Director of Affinity Technologies, an early-stage enterprise software company. Previously Drew was a partner at Formation 8. Before that, he served as Chief of Staff to Joe Lonsdale. Drew began his career as an analyst in the Technology Investment Banking Division of Moelis & Company in Palo Alto, California where he focused on M&A advisory in the Internet/Digital Media and Network Infrastructure industries. While in college Drew worked in the private equity group of Cascade Investment in Kirkland, Washington as well as for Asia Pacific Investment Partners, a Hong Kong-holdings company focused on real estate and mining investments in Mongolia. Drew received a B.A. in Economics and Mathematics cum laude from Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, California.

Dror led the firm’s investments in: Eikon Therapeutics, which employs revolutionary single molecule imaging technology to discover novel treatments for life-threatening diseases; Fabric, which is leveraging robotics to re-architect the supply chain; Vicarious Surgical, which applies robotics and virtual reality to minimally invasive surgeries; Atom Computing, which is building scalable quantum computers out of individual atoms; and Gatik, which is developing self-driving solutions for urban logistics — to name a few. Dror earned an MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business and a BS in Computer Science, and graduated undergrad cum laude from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev for computer science and bioinformatics. Prior to earning his MBA, Dror held various R&D roles at NICE Systems (Nasdaq: NICE) and was part of an elite Special Forces unit of the Israeli Defense Forces.