Bruno Bowden
Managing Partner at Grep Investor
Bruno Bowden
Managing Partner at Grep Investor
Portola Valley, California
Overview
Work Experience
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
2020 - Current
Grep VC is focused on early stage startup investments in AI and Robotics. Started the fund with Paul Willard. With the rise of deep learning, it has opened up new applications for robotics. RaaS is the new SaaS. Notable investments: - Electric Sheep - Rain AI - Zippedi Angel Investor active from 2010 to present. Most notable Angel Investments: - Aurora (seed) - Wayve AI (seed) - Getaround (seed) - HackerOne (seed) - Charm Therapeutics (seed) - Electric Sheep (seed)
Seed Investor
2019
Largest personal investor in Wayve. Big believer in end to end learning.
Board Member and Angel Investor
2011
Honored to be a public board member for Getaround, listed on the NYSE. I chair the nominating and governance committee. I was an angel investor back in 2011. Excited to see their journey so far and for what they'll be doing for many years to come. Getaround is the world's leading connected carsharing platform, on a mission toward empowering people to carshare everywhere.
COVID-19 App Lead
2020 - 2021
Co-founded and led 150 person volunteer team building the COVID-19 Mobile App for the World Health Organization. Presented and got approval from senior WHO leadership. Primary contact between the volunteers and WHO leadership. Launched end of 2020. By far the most challenging project I've ever undertaken.
Engineering Manager
2017 - 2018
Engineering management with the best group of engineers that I've ever worked with. Principally focused on the simulation technology needed to drive the incredibly high safety requirement needed. It will be a long road to get there.
Equity Partner
2012 - 2017
Supporting Matt Ocko and Zachary Bogue as an investor, sourcing and due diligence. Raised $400M over 4 funds to focus on seed, Series A and growth investments in big data, deep compute, IT and biotech. Data Collective and its principals have backed brilliant people changing global-scale businesses for over twenty years, helping create tens of billions of dollars of wealth for these entrepreneurs while also making the world a markedly better place. Investments include Planet Labs, MemSQL, LendUp, Kaggle, Tradeshift and many others. Biotech investments include AtomWise, Transcriptic, Vium and Zymergen. Exits includes Parse (sold to Facebook) and Nervana Systems ($400M sale to Intel).
Engineering Manager
2004 - 2012
2009 - 2012 My team and I were making Gmail Enterprise competitive with Microsoft Exchange. The most challenging project I've ever worked on, maintaining, remaking and migrating Postini's 10 year old stack to Google infrastructure. My director asked 7 times if I wanted to cancel parts of the project as it was so painful. I was adamant about persisting, my director supported me and we all made it a big success. It's now a substantial part of Google Enterprise's revenues. 2007 - 2008 Google Gadgets provided the interactive functionality of iGoogle and OpenSocial. I selected many of the hires and worked to establish its position within Google. I worked on Gadget Ads, supporting iGoogle and open sourcing a new Java codebase called Shindig through the Apache Foundation. Some great engineers but it didn't have enough critical mass of support within Google. Google Plus got that support years later but by that time Facebook was too established. 2004 - 2007 Starting as a client engineer, I worked up to managing all engineering on Google Earth and the 4.0 releases. This included expanding the team from 8 to 19 people, remote QA team of 6 people, 8 releases of the software, localization to 19 languages and the Mac and Linux ports. This is the hardest I've ever worked in my life and I loved it. For my efforts, I was promoted and received an EMG award (2nd highest award given in Google). Within the first year we scaled from 100 Thousand installs to 100 Million. Another 7 years later, it passed 1 Billion installs.
Software Engineer
2004 - 2004
The company was Google's first acquisition subsequent to their IPO and became the basis for the product Google Earth. My primary responsibility was graphics compatibility across PC graphics cards. To do this I developed a deep understanding of third party hardware/drivers. I also established a scripted QA process and a system to dynamically adjust the client to maintain speed and compatibility. I also worked on navigation, overlay projections and UI.
Graphics Engineer
2003 - 2004
Lead developer for internal graphics engine. Established future target platform, visual goals and milestones for 2006 release. Researched and promoted licensing a graphics engine. This was adopted to speed development and target risk/reward on unique technology.
Programmer
2002 - 2003
The studio is famous for the Diablo series of games. I developed and maintained the exporters to the internal game engine. This determined all the neccessary resources and optimized the resulting model - all while making it an easy process.
Education
BA
1997 - 2000