Ronald Weissman
Dr. Ronald Weissman is a venture capitalist and an angel investor with more than 35 years of experience in high technology investing and management. He advises companies and regional and national governments on private capital trends, including fundraising, valuation and public policy.
Currently, he is Senior Advisor to Neva, the venture capital arm of Intesa San Paolo, one of Europe’s largest banks. He is also Vice Chair of the Angel Capital Association, North America’s principal organization for professional angel investors. He is Chair of the ACA’s education committee and is the author of the ACA’s official courses on Early-Stage Boards of Directors and of Managing and Mitigating Early-Stage Investment Risks.
For the past seventeen years, Ron has been Chair of the Software Interest Group at the Band of Angels, Silicon Valley’s oldest angel group. He invests in AI, analytics, health IT, business software across a variety of deep tech industries.
He spent seventeen years as a partner at Apax Partners, a global VC/PE firm where he focused on technology and cross border investing in the US, Europe, the UK and Israel. Between his overlapping VC and angel careers, he has invested in or advised about fundraising, corporate growth, and governance to more than seventy startups and has served on more than forty private company boards. Recent exits have included Taulia (invoice arbitrage, sold to SAP in 2022) and Gainsight (customer experience management, sold to Vista Equity Partners in 2021).
He has spent the past decade educating investors and regional and national governments in startup hubs around the world, including Australia, Armenia, Chile, Georgia, Germany, Israel, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and Ukraine. He writes and speaks frequently about venture and angel investing, AI investing trends, valuation trends and regional startup hub best practices. He has also lectured widely about the impact of AI on key industries including energy, financial services, the law, and healthcare and has keynoted major conferences on AI and technology trends, Including MIT Israel’s 25th anniversary conference.
He was Chief Marketing Officer and head of Investor Relations for Verity, the former market leader in corporate information retrieval. During his tenure the company won Large Cap Turnaround of the Year. Earlier, as a direct report to Steve Jobs at NeXT, he managed global marketing strategy and European marketing. Prior to NeXT he spent twelve years working for US government agencies including the Department of Energy, DoD and the Department of Transportation, concurrent with professorships and university computing executive roles at the University of Maryland and Brown University.
He received his BA, MA and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, is a former Fulbright Scholar (Italy) and has written multiple works on the Italian Renaissance.
