Amol cofounded LifeX Ventures and Aikito. He is known for startups including Virgin Mobile, Peek, Halo Neuroscience, Knotel, and built a building in New York called East of East. He studied cognitive science for his Ph.D. at Stanford with undergraduate degree from Columbia. He teaches at Columbia. He is a backer, advisor, and mentor at 50+ companies.

Longer:

Dr. Amol Sarva is an American technology entrepreneur and investor.

He cofounded the venture capital firm LifeX Ventures in 2022 to back early-stage companies building the AI tech stack for health and biotech in the US and Europe.

In 2021, he created Popular Change, a company builder, that has been part of creating Aikito (turnkey construction platform).

In March 2021, Newmark acquired Knotel, which he cofounded in January 2016. Knotel was one of the largest flexible office providers in the world with hundreds of locations globally.

He helped develop a neurostimulation technology that boosts brain function, through the company Halo Neuroscience. Halo was backed by Lux Capital, Jazz Venture Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, and others.

Amol founded Knotable, a collaborative notes app for teams, with Edward Shenderovich of Kite Ventures and backing from Bloomberg Beta and 500 Startups.

He has been an advisor to: Plethora, a modern factory for getting metal parts faster; Fon, the world's largest wifi network; Payfone (mobile payments); Work Market (platform for labor resources, now part of ADP); and others.

Amol joined the adjunct faculty at Columbia University in 2016, teaching Venturing to Change the World and its advanced course Making History through Venturing.

Amol's been a mentor to several Techstars accelerators, NYC Seed, Jazz Human Performance Venture Partners, and the Columbia University startup programs.

Through his family angel fund Sarva, Sarva, Sarva & Sarva he is involved in ~50 startups ranging from electric bikes to kids clothing to key robots and food tech.

In 2007, Amol co-founded Peek as its CEO through worldwide product launches and raised over $25 million from top venture capital firms including RRE Ventures and Softbank.

Peek pioneered the mass market smartphone -- a $30 Internet and email gadget that won awards and honors from a litany of global critics: Time ("Gadget of the Year"), The New York Times ("Simple, comfortable and easy"), Wired ("Most Important Gadget"), BusinessWeek, and others.

In 2007, Amol testified in front of the Federal Communications Commission and the U.S. Senate advocating open access in wireless spectrum policy. He gave oral testimony before Senate committees and was a speaker at numerous policy conferences.

He's an original member of the Founders' Roundtable in New York, a group of 500+ venture-backed startup founders that has met monthly since 2006, and continues to be active in the entrepreneurial community.

Amol was cofounder of Blue Mobile, Digicel Group and Denis O'Brien's effort to create a simple prepaid wireless offering in the US, where he led partnerships with Verizon and Wal-Mart. He was also part of the early team at Virgin Mobile USA.

As the second employee of Virgin Mobile USA in San Francisco in January 2000, Amol was part of the founding team. He helped build the model, design the data features, and raise the money for the company.

Amol's Ph.D. is from Stanford University (pdf download, dissertation on the cognitive science of modularity) and he has a B.A. from Columbia University.

In Long Island City, Queens, he is the builder of an architecturally distinctive 9-story, 13-loft residential building that the New York Daily News architecture critic in 2010 called "the most important new building in Queens."

He was the creator of the popular neighborhood blog LICNYC.com since 2002, and a cool Got LIC? branded t-shirt, which became an iconic representation of the neighborhood.

He has a podcast interviewing CEOs of some of the world's largest companies and academics pioneering some of the world's best-known ideas called Amol's Podcasts.

He has a photograph in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, and collaborated on a work with the painter Tom Sanford in the collection of the museum of art at Syracuse University.

He has contributed writings to Fortune, Huffington Post, Alley Insider, Salon, Strategy & Business, and BusinessWeek.

His website is Amol.Sarva.Co.