Jack Crawford
Founding General Partner at Impact Investor I
Jack Crawford
Founding General Partner at Impact Investor I
Greater Sacramento
Overview
Work Experience
Founding General Partner
2016 - Current
Impact Venture Capital is a venture capital firm focused on seed stage startups using artificial intelligence applied to large market opportunities including high performance computing, robotics, drones, cybersecurity, and other fast growing areas of innovation. The firm is headquartered with an investment office in Silicon Valley -- and has an investment office and innovation center in Sacramento.
Host of Impact TV Corporate Video Series
2016
"Impact TV" is a corporate venture video series showcasing the top corporate investors and acquirers in the world including Samsung, Citi, Salesforce, Micron, SK Hynix, Yamaha, and others.
Chairman of Impact Global Venture Summit
2016
Launched in 2016, the Impact Global Venture Summit is one of the largest annual technology investor and entrepreneurship events in the US attracting more than 1,100 corporate investors and startups as speakers and attendees each year.
Co-Chair Kauffman Corporate Network
2022
As Co-Chair of the Kauffman Corporate Network, Jack mobilizes a group of 70+ members to discuss key trends and opportunities for corporate venture groups and corporate M&A teams. As one of the Co-Chairs, Jack hosts and interviews expert speakers then moderates a Q&A session with an audience of Kauffman Fellows as part of private in-person and online meetings.
Faculty
2014
In addition to being a 2x Mentor for other Kauffman Fellows, Jack is a regular speaker as part of the Kauffman Fellows Program on "Strategic Planning for Life" including a workshop and tool set enabling investors and entrepreneurs to assess, dream, plan, and execute on their best life.
Kauffman Fellows - Leadership Award
2011
Global leadership program and community for venture capitalist sponsored by the Kauffman Foundation. The Kauffman Fellowship is a highly sought-after two-year program dedicated exclusively to the world of innovation investing. While working full-time at an investment organization, a class of 30-40 Fellows receive a structured curriculum with an individual development plan, facilitated mentoring, and peer learning and networking – all with a focus on giving back and on one’s responsibility as an emerging leader in the industry. Graduating Fellows join a lifelong, global professional network. Kauffman Fellows celebrated their 15th anniversary in 2012. As of 2013, Kauffman Fellows have collectively made $6 billion in venture capital investments, sparking growth in hundreds of new enterprises, $15 billion in annually recurring revenues, and the creation of 50,000 jobs.
Investor & Board of Directors
2017
On behalf of Impact Venture Capital, Jack is an early investor and current board member at Cornami. The company has secured $68M of follow-on rounds of funding from Softbank, Applied Materials, Baidu, and other strategic investors. Cornami is an AI chip company that provides secure real-time computing from the cloud to the edge. The company delivers real-time computing on encrypted data sets. It's break-through sofware-defined TruStream computing architecture can scale performance without penalties to deliver real-time computing for several critical and complex applications. Cornami's proprietary technology reduce the use of power sources and lowers latency, while vastly increasing the computing performance for today's massive datasets whether at the edge or in the cloud. This includes, most notably, accelerating Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) for real-time computing on encrypted data sets which is vital for data privacy and cloud security in the $100+ billion banking, healthcare, government, and transportation industries.
Investor & Board of Directors
2019
On behalf of Impact Venture Capital, Jack is an early investor and current board member at TaskHuman. The company has secured $29.5M of follow-on rounds of funding from Zoom, USVP (early investor in Sun Microsystems, SanDisk), Madrona (early investor in Amazon, Snowflake) and other strategic investors. TaskHuman is the world’s first real-time digital coaching platform, allowing users to amplify their daily work and personal life with 1:1 personalized guidance from LIVE specialists over video calls. With TaskHuman, instantly discover and connect with the world’s most comprehensive global network of coaches, instructors, and specialists covering nearly 1,000 aspects of your well-being, such as physical fitness, mental well-being, spiritual, emotional, financial, career & leadership coaching, and more. With this platform, users can focus on self-care anytime — privately and cost effectively. The company has nearly one hundred full-time team members and close to 1,000 coaches around the world across 40 different countries.
Investor
2019
On behalf of Impact Venture Capital, Jack is an early investor and former board member at GigaIO. The company has secured $14.7M of funding from global investors including SK Hynix and other strategic investors. GigaIO is solving a major problem in the data center today by revamping the interconnect fabric architecture. GigaIO was founded by industry visionaries with decades of domain expertise in communications, networking, data centers, high-performance computing, open source and infrastructure management. They are developing innovative, high- performance interconnect fabric for computing clusters, with the objective of accelerating large-scale workloads on-demand, using industry-standard technology. Their unique, patented technology enables customers to create a unified, composable infrastructure resulting in excellent performance. GigaIO extreme connectivity for high-end computing delivers optimized resource utilization and reduced total cost of ownership.
Investor & Board of Directors
2019
On behalf of Impact Venture Capital, Jack is an early investor and current board member at Infinadeck. As showcased in the movie "Ready Player One", Infinadeck is an omnidirectional treadmill and Virtual Reality technology company. Virtual and Augmented Reality applications and widespread adoption have been hampered by a lack of lifelike walking devices with integrated software control systems to complement VR/AR Head Mounted Displays (HMD) and applications’ software. The most popular VR/AR walking devices mimic limited aspects of walking but do not permit actual unfettered walking or convey true immersion in a VR/AR world. Infinadeck has changed all that. Infinadeck’s patented system allows walking through and working in and virtual worlds with unprecedented realism, created by the world’s first omni-directional treadmill, powered by Infinadeck’s proprietary control system. The Infinadeck features true 360 degrees locomotion. Infinadeck’s solution works with any of the popular VR Development Systems and easily deploys through APIs with any specific VR games or programs. Because the Infinadeck solution provides a “real world” physical referent to the user, it greatly reduces or eliminates “VR Sickness”.
Investor
2011 - 2020
On behalf of Impact Venture Capital, Jack was an early investor in Pondera. The company secured co-investments from Serent Capital and others then was later acquired by Thomson Reuters. Pondera provides software to detect fraud in government programs and the healthcare industry. Since its inception, I collaborated with the Founder/CEO through a mentoring program I ran, our firm Impact Venture Capital co-invested alongside of Serent Capital in a $20M Series A, and the company was successfully acquired by Thomson Reuters (NYSE: TRI).
Investor
2013 - 2017
Jack was an early investor in Soft Machines. The company secured co-investments from Samsung and others then was later acquired by Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) for $250M. Soft Machines was a semiconductor company that demonstrated a 500MHz chip fabricated using a 28-nanometer process that was touted as a breakthrough in semiconductor design. Whereas conventional CPUs like those Intel sells are built to run several concurrent threads on each of their physical cores, the startup’s system takes the opposite approach and distributes every thread across multiple processing units. Work is automatically split up using a built-in load balancer. The system requires so little computing capacity to perform the parallelization that it can squeeze out to four times more performance per watt than traditional CPUs.
Venture Capital Portfolio Manager / Advisor
2013 - 2016
Portfolio management of Oracle's venture capital investments and acquired ownership positions including $5+ billion of successful exits of 8 portfolio companies.
Seed Investor
1996 - 2013
Active seed investor as part of a micro-VC fund including mentoring and first round investments into Soft Machines (acquired by Intel for $250M+), Revionics (followed by $40M investment from Sierra Ventures and Goldman Sachs), and CirrusMD (followed by $30M investment from Drive Capital, Three Leaf Ventures, and Sand Hill Angels).