Jalak Jobanputra
Jalak Jobanputra is the Founding Partner of Future\Perfect Ventures, an early stage venture capital fund in NYC focused on next-generation technology such as blockchain and machine learning. FPV’s portfolio includes Abra, Open Garden, Blockstream, Bitpesa, FuseMachines, Everledger, and Blockchain. Jalak was awarded Institutional Investor’s Top Fintech Dealmakers of 2017 and 2016 and was also listed as a 100 Most Influential Fintech Leader of 2016 and 2017 based on her investment strategy at FPV. In 2017, she was cited as a “Top 5 Investor Powering the Blockchain Boom” and Crunchbase noted FPV as one of the top VC funds in blockchain “before it was cool”. In Spring 2018, Jalak received the Microsoft Top VC Trailblazer Award for her "valuable contribution to the blockchain community" and was appointed to the American Banker Advisory Board. Since founding the firm, she has spoken on blockchain technology, IoT, and artificial intelligence at many global conferences, including the Milken Global Institute, Dutch Development Bank/FMO annual meeting, and The Economist Buttonwood Gathering. Additionally, Jalak is the Founder of Collective Future, a global initiative to foster diversity, inclusion, and education in the blockchain sector.
Before founding Future\Perfect Ventures, Jobanputra 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 the fastest growing Indian mobile classified ad site, and closed Omidyar’s largest for-profit investment ($5M) to date in Latin America, a wireless company that created credit profiles on unbanked middle income consumers using mobile data.
Jobanputra was previously Senior Vice President at the New York City Investment Fund (NYCIF), a private economic development fund, where she managed the fund’s technology and digital media venture investments. While there, Jobanputra spearheaded the formation of NYCSeed in 2008, a seed fund dedicated to funding early stage tech entrepreneurs in NYC, in response to a market gap in seed funding at the time. She was also on the selection committee and served as a mentor and speaker for NYCSeedStart, NYC’s first summer accelerator program, and helped launch the FinTech Innovation Lab, which has since been replicated in London and Hong Kong. Jobanputra 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), Thumbplay (acquired by Clear Channel), Schoolnet (acquired by Pearson) and TXVia (acquired by Google), in addition a debt instrument to Grameen America, and seed investments in Magnetic, Ticketfly (acquired by Pandora), Enterproid (acquired by Google) and SeatGeek.
Prior to NYCIF, she was a Principal at New Venture Partners, a $300 million early stage venture fund that commercialized technology out of corporate labs. At NVP, she founded and served as interim CEO of Real Time Content (spun out of British Telecom) in 2005, 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, Jobanputra 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 (IPO) 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 Brothers and Broadview in NYC and London.
