Babak "Bobby" Yazdani (born 1963)
is an
Iranian-American
Iranian Americans are United States citizens or nationals who are of Iranian ancestry or who hold Iranian citizenship.
Iranian Americans are among the most highly educated people in the United States. They have historically excelled in busine ...
entrepreneur
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value. With this definition, entrepreneurship is viewed as change, generally entailing risk beyond what is normally encountered in starting a business, which may include other values th ...
and investor specializing in early-stage, private U.S.-based modern enterprise technology companies.
In 1997, he founded Saba Software, a provider of
Human Capital Management
Humans (''Homo sapiens'') are the most abundant and widespread species of primate, characterized by bipedalism and exceptional cognitive skills due to a large and complex brain. This has enabled the development of advanced tools, culture, an ...
(HCM) software solutions. He took the company public in 2000. Yazdani founded Signatures Capital in 2006 and co-founded investment firm Cota Capital in 2014, where he serves as a Partner.
Yazdani was ranked #1 out of 2000
angel investor
An angel investor (also known as a business angel, informal investor, angel funder, private investor, or seed investor) is an individual who provides capital for a business or businesses start-up, usually in exchange for convertible debt or owners ...
s in a 2014 report by CB Insights as having the most successful track record for investing in companies that received follow-on funding.
Yazdani began investing in 1989 and is an early investor in companies such as
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
,
Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...
,
Klout
Klout was a website and mobile app that used social media analytics to rate its users according to online social influence via the "Klout Score", which was a numerical value between 1 and 100. In determining the user score, Klout measured the size ...
,
Salesforce
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...
and
Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), package ...
.
Early life and education
Yazdani was born in
Tehran
Tehran (; fa, تهران ) is the largest city in Tehran Province and the capital of Iran. With a population of around 9 million in the city and around 16 million in the larger metropolitan area of Greater Tehran, Tehran is the most popul ...
to a middle-class family. He left Iran in 1980 for the United Kingdom, where he completed his high-school education.
Yazdani moved to the United States at age 19 and graduated with a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the
University of California at Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant univ ...
.
Career
Oracle
From 1988 to 1997, Yazdani held various senior management positions at
Oracle Corporation
Oracle Corporation is an American multinational computer technology corporation headquartered in Austin, Texas. In 2020, Oracle was the third-largest software company in the world by revenue and market capitalization. The company sells da ...
.
Saba Software
Yazdani founded Saba Software in 1997 and took the company public in 2000. He was identified as an industry pioneer in creating the Human Capital Management category. Under his leadership, Saba acquired THINQ Learning Solutions in May 2005, Centra Software in 2006 and Pedagogue Solutions and Comartis in June 2011. Yazdani stepped down as CEO in 2013 when Saba was acquired by Vector Capital. The following year, Yazdani agreed to an SEC-negotiated claw back of $2.5 million in bonuses. Yazdani was not charged with any wrongdoing. In February 2020, Saba was acquired by Cornerstone OnDemand for $1.3 billion.
Signatures Capital
In 2006, Yazdani founded Signatures Capital, which serves as his family office and focuses on early stage investments.
Yazdani’s first investment was in medical technology company Masimo, for which he provided capital but also wrote software to improve the accuracy of Masimo’s early neonatal pulse oximeters.
According to the
Huffington Post
''HuffPost'' (formerly ''The Huffington Post'' until 2017 and sometimes abbreviated ''HuffPo'') is an American progressive news website, with localized and international editions. The site offers news, satire, blogs, and original content, and ...
, Yazdani has invested in more than 100 companies in the technology sector via Signature Capital.
Through Signatures Capital investments, Yazdani invested, among others, in
Dropbox
Dropbox is a file hosting service operated by the American company Dropbox, Inc., headquartered in San Francisco, California, U.S. that offers cloud storage, file synchronization, personal cloud, and Client (computing), client software. Dropb ...
,
Google
Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...
,
Uber
Uber Technologies, Inc. (Uber), based in San Francisco, provides mobility as a service, ride-hailing (allowing users to book a car and driver to transport them in a way similar to a taxi), food delivery (Uber Eats and Postmates), package ...
,
Masimo
Masimo Corporation is a global medical technology company that develops, manufactures, and markets a variety of noninvasive patient monitoring technologies, hospital automation solutions, home monitoring devices, ventilation solutions, and consu ...
,
Nextbio (acquired by Illumina),
SoundHound
SoundHound Inc. is an audio and speech recognition company founded in 2005. It develops speech recognition, natural language understanding, sound recognition and search technologies. Its featured products include Houndify, a Voice AI developer p ...
,
Salesforce
Salesforce, Inc. is an American cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management (CRM) software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, a ...
, Clever Sense (acquired by Google), Greensmith Energy (acquired by Wartsila), Baarzo (acquired by Google), Bina Technologies (acquired by
Roche
F. Hoffmann-La Roche AG, commonly known as Roche, is a Swiss multinational healthcare company that operates worldwide under two divisions: Pharmaceuticals and Diagnostics. Its holding company, Roche Holding AG, has shares listed on the SIX S ...
) and Checkr.
Cota Capital
In 2014, Yazdani co-founded Cota Capital, a technology investment firm that partners with technology companies to help them grow and develop "the opportunity for improving lives." Since its inception, the firm has invested in numerous private and public technology companies, including Berkeley Lights,
Capella Space, Cloud Lending (acquired by Q2 Holdings),
Tubi
Tubi is an American over-the-top content platform and ad-supported streaming service owned by Fox Corporation. The service was launched on April 1, 2014, and is based in Los Angeles, California. In January 2021, Tubi reached 33 million monthly ...
(acquired by
FoxCorp), Gusto (formerly ZenPayroll), Mission Bio and Movandi, OpenGov, ParkourSC and Truebill (acquired by Rocket Companies), and Rhombus Systems.
Philanthropy
Bobby Yazdani is a founding member of the Persian Tech Entrepreneurs network and a member of The Reset Foundation.
He also underwrote the Signatures Innovation Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley, between 2015 and 2019, which supported "data science projects with commercial promise."
In 2022, Yazdani and other members of the Iranian-American community established the American Legacy Fund, an endowment program meant to support the development of youth soccer in the United States. He serves on the board of trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and he is a supporter of the
Maryam Mirzakhani
Maryam Mirzakhani ( fa, مریم میرزاخانی, ; 12 May 1977 – 14 July 2017) was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ...
Endowed Professorship, created in honor of the late Fields medalist.
Cota Impact Fund
The Cota Impact Fund provides grants to a number of philanthropic institutions, such as the
International Red Cross
The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC; french: Comité international de la Croix-Rouge) is a humanitarian organization which is based in Geneva, Switzerland, and it is also a three-time Nobel Prize Laureate. State parties (signato ...
, the
World Central Kitchen
World Central Kitchen (WCK) is a not-for-profit non-governmental organization devoted to providing meals in the wake of natural disasters. Founded in 2010 by chef José Andrés, the organization prepared food in Haiti following its devastati ...
and
UNICEF
UNICEF (), originally called the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund in full, now officially United Nations Children's Fund, is an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing Humanitarianism, humanitarian and Devel ...
.
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Yazdani, Bobby
Living people
American technology chief executives
American people of Iranian descent
University of California, Berkeley alumni
1963 births
Place of birth missing (living people)
Businesspeople from San Francisco