Serial founder · Los Angeles, California
Serial founder and operating principal with a thirty-year record of founding, building, and divesting technology companies across financial services, medical devices, defense and aerospace manufacturing, security hardware, enterprise software, and media.
I specialize in identifying structural inefficiencies in mature sectors and building the infrastructure layer underneath: codecs, protocols, data rails, tokenization standards. The goal is that incumbents have to adopt or license from my entities.
I assemble founding teams around defensible IP and execute to exit on a deliberate five-to-ten-year horizon. I have done it across eight companies in unrelated sectors, with one through-line: own the layer everyone else has to build on top of.
Early-stage platform ecosystem for the tokenization of real-world assets. Directs a twelve-subsidiary operating structure spanning art, real estate, music, vaulting, insurance, fintech, and investment.
Site: aval.xyz ↗
Capital raised: $5.6M · AUM: $2.2B (assets pledged and tokenized by the alpha-stage application)
Sister Delaware corporations developing foundational cryptographic infrastructure and client-facing applications. Holds patents in the mitigation of cryptographic asset attacks.
Capitalization: $3.5M, privately funded
Independent foundation underwriting classroom technology programs across a public school district of 13,500 students and 23 schools. Grants awarded twice annually through a competitive review process.
Cumulative distributions: over $4M
Sensor-based wearable diagnostic platform for traumatic brain injury patients. Architected the clinical data infrastructure underlying predictive brain-health modeling, therapeutic development, and longitudinal datasets across the broader category of brain conditions.
Raised $52M through Series A · Acquired 2025 by Esaote Group for $700M (cash and stock)
Strategic advisory and solution engineering for Fortune 500 defense and aerospace manufacturing leadership: Boeing, Raytheon, L3/Harris, Aerojet Rocketdyne, FLIR Systems. Built an augmented-reality and logistics system that underpinned Boeing's pre-COVID scaling of 737 production from 15 to more than 52 deliveries per month, and a vendor audit platform for L3 that accelerated government contract compliance filings.
Capitalization: $12.25M, privately funded · Acquired 2020 for $26M
Intra-agency communications infrastructure for first-responder networks. Engineered a unified interoperability layer for national law enforcement that bridged formerly siloed jurisdictional databases, integrating real-time computer vision from body-worn cameras with centralized data sharing for instant suspect identification and cross-state threat alerts.
Raised $37.5M through Series A · Acquired 2016 by Peraton for $615M
Dual-track technology company divested in two transactions. The mobile division (workforce management and supplier-vendor communications) was acquired by Orange Soft; the SaaS division (warehouse management, data engineering, information management) by Körber Group.
Raised $18M · Exits: $65M (Orange Soft) and $88M (Körber Group)
Proprietary video codecs, firmware, and data compression for the IP surveillance industry. Extended system architecture from four-camera to sixty-four-camera arrays and authored the watermarking and feature sets that enabled deployment into banking and government infrastructure.
Raised $25M through Series A · Manufacturing acquired by Dahua Technology for $490M; software licensed to TrendNET, Axis Communications and Bosch for $325M
Integrated marketing and promotions across urban music, street fashion, and film. Pioneered the music industry's first digital campus distribution and response-analytics system for major labels including Polygram, Universal, Warner Elektra Atlantic, BMG, and EMI-Capitol. Also Regional Director of Marketing, Universal Music.
Programs drove over 385M CDs sold · Acquired 2003 for $11.3M
Short articles on the industries I work in.
Wealth bands were never designed to measure everything people own. They measure what the industry can service, and better infrastructure for verifying and governing assets may redraw that line.
You can put a lie on a blockchain and it is still a lie. The recoveries in a 2025 study of cultural property trafficking depended on evidence documented before the theft, and that lesson applies to anyone bringing real-world assets on-chain.
University of California, Los Angeles, 2003. BA Political Science; BA Business Economics.
Board service at every company founded, including chair at Aval, BrainWare, MoPSys, DigiCast, and HHN. Three decades as chair of the Kaufman Foundation. Select advisory engagements in sectors adjacent to active operating commitments.
Email: joe [at] foolproof [dot] xyz
No LinkedIn. No social media. This site is the canonical source.