Advisors

Todd Dagres | Board of Directors & Investor

Todd Dagres is a founder and General Partner of Spark Capital. He leads the drive to find the home runs, to uncover the 100x opportunities. He has said that his work to bring Akamai from idea to publicly traded company was his doctoral thesis in venture capital. It is that bedrock of knowledge and the experiences built upon it that he brings to Jana. Todd was previously a General Partner and Executive Committee Member at Battery Ventures. There he led the Communications Investment practice while focusing on the media, entertainment and communications industries.

Kevin Talbot | Board of Directors & Investor

Kevin Talbot is Co-Managing Partner of the BlackBerry Partners Fund in addition to being Managing Director of RBC Venture Partners where he oversees North American venture capital investments in early-stage enterprise software and services companies. Mr. Talbot has a long and successful track record as an entrepreneur and operator in the information technology industry in both Canada and the USA where he developed extensive start-up, growth and turn-around experience.

Esther Dyson | Advisory Board member

Esther Dyson is an acknowledged luminary in the technology industry, highly influential in her field.  For more than 20 years she has been a widely known commentator focusing on emerging technologies, business models, markets, and companies.  She wrote the newsletter Release 1.0 and ran PC Forum, the IT market’s leading executive conference, until 2006.   Ms. Dyson was the founding chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) from 1998 to 2000.  In the 90s, she was chairman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Ms. Dyson’s current primary activity is investing in start-ups and guiding many of them as a board member.

Kevin Wall | Advisory Board member

Kevin Wall is an Emmy Award-winning producer, activist and new media entrepreneur. As vice chairman of iXL, a global Internet consulting firm, Wall led the strategic acquisition and organization of 42 Internet design and consulting companies. A co-founder of Shelter Capital Partners, a $175 million venture capital fund, Wall is currently invested in a dozen companies in the mobile and IT sectors. He recently partnered with Harvey Goldsmith, world renowned concert promoter and producer, to form Ignite – a full service experiential marketing agency – based in London.

Mike Baker | Advisory Board member

Mike Baker is president and CEO of DataXu, the only multi-channel Demand Side Platform (DSP) for display, video, mobile, and social advertisers. He has been pioneering digital media platforms for more than 20 years, and is widely recognized as a mobile media visionary. Before co-founding DataXu, he was vice president and general manager at Nokia, where he created and ran Nokia Interactive. Baker joined Nokia through its acquisition of mobile advertising leader Enpocket in 2007, where he was the founding investor and CEO. An active angel investor in digital media, he is currently chairman of the board of Nexage, the largest mobile ad exchange.

Investors

Spark Capital is a venture fund focused on the conflux of the media, entertainment and technology industries. Over the last decade, the Spark team has been instrumental in the development of new markets and market leaders such as Akamai Technologies, Qtera, Aether Systems, Novatel Wireless, Twitter, 5Min, Altius Education, AdMeld, Verivue and Tumblr. With deep experience and $980 million under management, Spark Capital provides world-class entrepreneurs and revolutionary companies with the resources to succeed in today’s marketplace.

RBC Venture Partners is a dedicated team of venture capital professionals specializing in early-stage software and services for enterprise, financial services and mobile applications. Kevin Talbot and Alex Baker provided the original seed funding for Jana and are still actively involved with the company.

Qualcomm Ventures was launched in the United States in November 2000 with an initial US$500 million allocation.  Qualcomm Ventures’ aim is to support Qualcomm’s mission of enabling and fostering 3G CDMA and wireless Internet markets through strategic investments in privately owned startup ventures.

Flywheel Ventures is a seed and early-stage venture capital firm focused on investments in digital and physical infrastructure, energy and water.  Flywheel generally makes initial institutional investments in companies and partners with entrepreneurs to build businesses that can win in a global marketplace.