Overview

Gender

female

Investor Type

Investment Partner,Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Jalak Jobanputra is Founding Partner of Future\Perfect Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund in NYC. Previously, she was the Director of Mobile Investments at Omidyar Network, a philanthrocapitalist fund started by Pierre Omidyar, co-founder of eBay. While there, she created a mobile investment strategy, invested in an East African mobile tech incubator, invested in an Indian mobile classifieds site, and closed Omidyar’s largest for profit investment ($5M) to date in Latin America. She has over 18 years experience in venture capital, media and technology. She was previously Senior Vice President at the New York City Investment Fund (NYCIF), a private economic development fund founded by Henry Kravis, where she managed the fund’s technology and digital media venture investments. While there, Jalak spearheaded the formation of NYCSeed in 2008, a seed fund dedicated to funding early stage tech entrepreneurs in NYC. She also was on the selection committee and served as a mentor and speaker for NYCSeedStart, NYC’s first summer accelerator program and helped launched the FinTech Innovation Lab, which has since been replicated in London. Jalak worked closely with the Bloomberg administration and NYCEDC to implement initiatives to help diversify the NYC economy through NYC’s growing tech/digital sectors and served on Governor Paterson’s Small Business Taskforce. Her portfolio at NYCIF included outside.in (acquired by AOL), Imagespan, Thumbplay and TXVia (acquired by Google) in addition to seed investments Magnetic, Ticketfly, Enterproid and SeatGeek.

Prior to NYCIF, she was a Principal at New Venture Partners, a $300 million early stage venture fund which commercialized technology out of corporate labs. At NVP, she founded and served as interim CEO of Real Time Content (spun out of British Telecom), a personalized video ad platform, and was a Director of Procelerate Technologies, a SaaS workflow management tool for the aerospace industry. She also incubated a range of other technologies, including speech recognition/NLP, 3D displays, video surveillance, 4G wireless broadband and music recommendation software.

From 1999-2003, Jalak was at Intel Capital in Silicon Valley, where she invested in enterprise software, internet and digital media startups, including Demantra (sold to Oracle), Extricity (sold to Peregrine), Viacore (sold to IBM), R Systems (IPO), Financial Engines (IPO), Yodlee and Zinio. In 1997 in NYC, in the early days of Silicon Alley, she launched and managed product development for online financial information startup Horsesmouth. She began her career in media, telecom and tech investment banking at Lehman and Broadview in NYC and London.

Born in Nairobi to Indian parents, Jalak has invested, and traveled extensively, in North and South America, India, Europe, Africa, East Asia and Latin America. She is also active in supporting education reform and social entrepreneurship and served as a Trustee of Achievement First Bushwick Charter Schools (Brooklyn) and sits on the Executive Committee of the Social Investment Council of Echoing Green. She is on the Board of Directors for the Center for an Urban Future, Advisory Board of Loreal’s Women in Digital Initiative, and Access to Capital Subcommittee member of the US Secretary of State Women’s Leadership Council. She served as a Mentor for the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder in the summer of 2010, a summer accelerator for social entrepreneurs worldwide. In 2003, she took a year long sabbatical from VC to consult on replication strategy for Gates Foundation funded charter schools, including the Big Picture Company. Jalak spent four months setting up microfinance programs and training women entrepreneurs in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania after receiving her MBA from the Kellogg School of Management in 1999. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in Communications from the Annenberg School and a BSE in Finance from the Wharton School.

Jalak was selected as an Outstanding 50 Asian American in Business in 2010 by the Asian American Development Center. She was selected as a US State Department Delegate to Indonesia in the summer of 2011, where she met with entrepreneurs, angel investors and business leaders to promote tech entrepreneurship. Jalak is a Techstars NYC Mentor, Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator Mentor, Charter Member of TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs), Advisory Board Member of Astia NYC, the Wharton Private Equity Network, Kellogg Entrepreneurs, and is a frequent speaker and judge at entrepreneur and venture conferences, including Mobile World Congress, CTIA, TechCrunch Disrupt, Bloomberg and AlwaysOn. She has been asked to speak on entrepreneurship and innovation ecosystems by the Obama White House, as well as governments worldwide. She can be found at @jalak or on her blog www.thebarefootvc.com.