Founder Institute

  • DATABASE (876)

  • ARTICLES (562)

    • DATABASE (876)
    • ARTICLES (562)
  • Sort by
    • Relevance
    • Date

Caris LeVert is a professional basketball player in the USA’s National Basketball Association league, playing for the Brooklyn Nets. A graduate of the University of Michigan, he joined the Nets in 2016, after the Indiana Pacers swapped him for Thaddeus Young in that year’s draft. In 2019, the Nets signed a three year-extension for LeVert’s contract, worth $52.5m.LeVert is managed by Roc Nation, the entertainment and sports management firm founded by musician Jay-Z. He took part in Roc Nation’s investment (via venture arm Arrive) in Indonesian coffee brand Kopi Kenangan. LeVert is also the founder of the 22 Initiative, a youth mentorship program in New York.

Established in 2018, Jensen Group Investment Fund is the generalist investment fund of Danish entrepreneur Steen Ulf Jensen, founder of the Jensen Group, a global manufacturer of machines for the heavy-duty laundry industry based in Belgium. Jensen was also the CEO of Box TV and Digicel Cabel. The fund has so far invested in four startups with Jensen becoming board chairman at the investee companies. In 2020, the fund acquired stakes in the July €1.1m seed round of Danish alt-leather biotech Beyond Leather Materials and in the funding of Danish bike lock startup PentaLock earlier in March.

Fernando Cabello-Astolfi is a Spanish serial entrepreneur and angel investor in the fintech ecosystem. He has a masters degree in Global Market Economics from the London School of Economics. He is the co-founder and CEO of Ibercheck, a leading company that issues solvency reports for individuals in Spain. In 2014, he founded consumer credit fintech Aplazame, which was sold to WiZink Bank in 2018. Fernando is the CEO of Aplazame, heading the product, risk and finance departments. More recently, he launched Devengo, an innovative payroll model that allows employees to collect their salary when needed, instead of on a fixed date each month, at no extra cost to the company.

Dharmash Mistry is non-executive director of the British Business Bank and the BBC. He is also a partner at LGT Lightstone, Balderton Capital and Lakestar. As an experienced venture capitalist and entrepreneur Mistry has raised and managed investment funds totaling $1bn. He is a board member and one of the early investors of unicorns like Revolut and Glovo.Mistry is the former MD of Ascential plc, formerly EMAP, B2B media business specializing in exhibitions and information services and listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE). He was also the chair and co-founder of Blow Ltd, an on-demand beauty services provider in the UK. Mistry also previously held non-executive director roles in companies like Dixons Retail and Hargreaves Lansdown.

María Eugenia García founded her first business in 2013, dedicated to the import and export of education materials. After a stint in Hong Kong, she closed the business and focused on developing the MenteLista platform to follow her passion for neuroscience and how it can be used to enhance children's learning.She had previously managed the Andalusian Center of Technology and Innovation (CITIC) for 11 years. She had also worked as a senior consultant at BAE Systems. She has a computer science degree from Salamanca Pontifical University and a master's in Business Administration from San Telmo International Institute.

Anirudh Sharma is one of three co-founders of Graviky Labs, which makes ink out of carbon that is captured from pollution and purified using proprietary technology. This concept was born from Sharma’s experiments making ink from candle soot while doing his master’s at MIT Materials Lab. He currently leads R&D and business at the firm. Sharma’s interests include augmented reality, wearable computing and environmental projects. Over the years, he has developed and patented various technology products with social and environmental impact. He was formerly CTO and co-founder of India’s first wearable technology company, Ducere Technologies, which was later sold. This company makes Lechal, the world’s first smart haptic device for shoes, initially designed by Sharma as a navigation aid for the visually impaired. Sharma also previously worked for Imagin Group at Hewlett Packard Labs, on a multimodal speech and touch-based computer-aided design interface for large displays.Sharma holds a master's from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and co-led the activities of MIT Media Lab India from 2013–2015. He is a TED and TEDx speaker and has been included in Forbes’ 30 Under 30 for Asia, MIT Technology Review’s 35 Innovators Under 35, and Foreign Policy magazine’s 100 Global Thinkers of 2016. 

Based in Madrid, K Fund is a VC firm founded in July 2016 by Ian Noel and Iñaki Arrola, focusing on seed and early-stage investments in digital technology startups. It has to date raised one fund of €50m. As of 1Q 2020, K Fund had invested in 25 companies, with its most recent investments including HR platform Factorial's €15m Series A round and in open source platform Frontity's €1m seed round.Noel represents Bonsai VC while Arrola is a serial entrepreneur (Coches.com and Vitamina K). A third co-founder is Carina Szpilka from ING Direct. Other team members include Ignacio Larrú (IE Business School), Pablo Ventura (JME Ventures) and technology journalist Jaime Novoa (Novobrief, Tech.eu). K Fund’s other investors include public institutions such as EIF and private investors.

Yu is the founder and chairman of NYSE-listed New Oriental Education & Technology Group. Upon graduating from Peking University with a bachelor’s degree in English in 1985, he started teaching English at his alma mater. Yu resigned from the university in 1991 and, two years later, founded the New Oriental School, where students learned how to pass the TOEFL exam or score high on the GRE. In 2014, he co-founded Hongtai Capital Holdings (Aplus Capital), which manages over RMB 20 billion in assets, with fellow entrepreneur Sheng Xitai. As an angel investor, Yu invests mainly in edtech startups. 

Founded in 2011, Kika Tech is an international mobile input software developer based in Beijing. Released in 2017 and powered by an AI engine, its core product Kika Keyboard supports more than 20 languages and helps users communicate authentically by predicting intent and context to enhance expressive communication. The company has 500m users worldwide and, as of the end of 2018, earned monthly revenue of RMB 20m. Kika CTO Yao Conglei is also co-founder and CTO of Bailian.ai.

Rodolfo Lomascolo is a serial entrepreneur with a strong technical foundation in the software, e-commerce and energy sector.  He has more than 25 years of experience in C-level positions and is one of the pioneers who fostered the early growth of the tech ecosystem in Spain. For over 14 years, Lomascolo was CEO of the Internet Publishing Services Certification Authority (ipsCA) that was eventually acquired by the STS Group, of which he was subsequently vice-president of International Business Development, growing the company's revenue from zero to €30m in three years. In 2015, he became co-founder and CEO of Pervasive Technologies, a company that deploys big data, machine learning and IoT for digital innovation.  

ICONIQ Capital is a private investment management company that is known for serving a wide variety of famous clients, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg, Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and Asian billionaire Li Ka-shing, among other Silicon Valley elites and world-famous billionaires. The company is led by Divesh Makan, Chad Boeding and Michael Anders, who were coworkers at Goldman Sachs and joined Morgan Stanley together before establishing ICONIQ in 2011.The investment company is a mix of family office and venture capital, with specialized verticals in tech startup investing, real estate, and impact investments. Its VC arm, ICONIQ Growth, manages over $9b in capital commitments, and has invested into companies like stock brokerage app Robinhood, short-term accommodation startup Airbnb, and online signature company DocuSign.

Founded in Silicon Valley by serial investor and founder of Google Ventures Bill Marris, Section 32 has multiple investment interests with medicine and biotech key amongst them.  Marris himself has invested in over 500 companies, with over one-third resulting in IPO or M&A. Fifty of his portfolio companies have exceeded $1bn valuations, including Uber.  Section 32 currently has 48 companies in its portfolio. Its most recent investments have included in Canadian remote medicine platform Cover Health’s $43m Series B round and in the $100m Series B round of US cancer detection software C2i Genomics, both in April 2021. In March 2021, it participated in the $48m Series A round of Dutch cell-based meat startup Meatable which leverages pluripotent stem cells for the first time in foodtech.

The VC arm of Kalonia, a Barcelona-based management consultancy focused on corporate digital transformation, Kalonia Venture Partners invests in B2B software, AI and fintech startups in the Spanish-speaking world. The VC is currently investing via its KVP III fund of €4.3m, with a target of 10 investments of about €5m on average each, taking equity stakes of 10% onward in co-investment; plus two follow-ons. Founded by Josep Arroyo, Alejandro Olabarría y Enrique Marugán, Kalonia began helping Spanish investors diversify into Silicon Valley and other US startups as early as 2001. Currently its funds come mainly from Barcelona-based family offices. Co-founder Alejandro Olabarría is son of Pedro Olabarría Delclaux, the powerful patriarch heading one of Spain's richest industrialist families today, with interests across industrial farming, banking, real estate, automotive and paper.

Diego Ballesteros is one of Spain's most prominent serial entrepreneurs and business angels, backing some of the most successful acquisitions in Spain and Latin America. He made his first disclosed investment in 2016, as an angel investor of Spanish femtech WOOM’s pre-seed and seed funding rounds. He is currently the sole founder of Bewe SaaS for beauty and wellness professionals.Ballesteros started his first enterprise in 1997, an online classified ads platform Ocioteca.com and also MundoSalud that was acquired by Sanitas of Bupa Group.  Cabify and co-investments with Seaya Ventures also form part of his investment portfolio. One of his biggest successes is on-demand food delivery platform SinDelantal with operations in Spain and Mexico. In 2013, the Spanish delivery company was acquired by Just Eat that later also bought the Mexican company in 2015.

Russian-born Sergey Brin is the co-founder of Google and was the president of Google's parent company, Alphabet Inc, until stepping down in 2019. Brin is the world's ninth-richest person with a personal fortune of $86.5bn. His investments include OccamzRazor in 2019, a machine learning medtech platform supporting research into Parkinson’s Disease. In 2015, he contributed undisclosed funding to his former Stanford classmate Martin Roscheisen’s US-based firm Diamond Foundry, the first certified carbon-neutral lab-produced diamond manufacturer.no non copyrighted pic for use

Sorry, we couldn’t find any matches for“Founder Institute”.

Your payment was not successful.

Please make sure you have entered your payment details correctly. Or try again in a few moments.

small logo

The discount code you entered is invalid

Please make sure you have entered your discount code correctly. Or try again in a few moments.

Download successful.

Your sample has been sent. Please check your email.

By accessing and using www.compasslist.com and all pages within the domain (the “Website”), You accept and agree to have read, understood, accepted and agreed to be bound by the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy in full. If you disagree with all or any part of these Terms of Use and Privacy Policy, please do not use or continue any further use of this website. You acknowledge that you are aware that this Website contains an archive of existing content as at 31 December 2021 and is not being actively managed. We are under no obligation to update the content on this Website and, accordingly, no new content or articles will be posted to the Website after 31 December 2021.