Barney Pell

Angel Investor, VC & Entrepreneur

Role: Fellow

Site: CDL-Toronto

Stream: Artificial Intelligence

Barney Pell is an active start-up investor and advisor with over 200 investments. He enjoys helping bring advanced technology and big ideas into real applications and markets that change people’s lives.

Barney is currently a Fellow in the Creative Destruction Laboratory, one of the world’s top start-up accelerators. He is a venture partner at Radical Ventures, a VC focused on early-stage investments in deep tech and AI. He was previously co-founder of Moon Express, a start-up developing a commercial lunar lander, an associate founder of Singularity University, and chairman of the science advisory board for Figure Eight

Barney was previously the founder and CEO of Powerset, a natural language search engine that Microsoft acquired. He then stayed on with Microsoft as a search strategist and evangelist for Bing, Microsoft’s new consumer search engine, and later as architect and development manager for Bing’s Local/Mobile Search. Before starting Powerset, he was at Mayfield VC as an Entrepreneur in Residence.

Prior to Mayfield, barney managed an 85-person advanced IT R&D organization at NASA. Highlights included flying the first AI system in deep space (on the Deep Space One mission), the first spoken dialog system in space, and supporting the Mars Exploration Rovers mission.

He has been active in startup companies in operational and advisory roles for over 20 years. Previous startups included StockMaster.com, a leading online financial content provider acquired by Red Herring in March 2000, and Whizbang! Labs, a leading innovator of web-based information extraction agents. Whizbang created Flipdog, an online recruiting site that automatically built the world’s largest jobs database extracted directly from corporate website, which was acquired by Monster.com.

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