Name Jonah Schnel | Education Tulane University | |
Jonah Schnel is co-founder and Managing Partner of Los Angeles-based venture capital firm, ITU Ventures. He is also current Director of Surfect Holdings and has been serving on Surfect Technologies' Board of Directors since June 2006.
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Education and early career
Jonah Schnel graduated with a Bachelor of Arts summa cum laude from Tulane University. He is also a member of the steering committee for Caltech's Partnership for Innovation Entrepreneurial Fellows Program sponsored by the National Science Foundation and is a member of the Technology Transfer Advisory Board at the Colorado School of Mines.
In his early twenties, Mr. Schnel became a Manager at SunAmerica, Inc., where he participated in the origination and management of $1.5 billion in corporate and real estate portfolio assets.
Career in Venture Capital
In the year 2000, Jonah Schnel together with Chad Brownstein co-founded ITU Ventures, a venture capital firm specializing in seeding capital to promising technology-driven startup companies.
In 2001, Jonah Schnel representing ITU Ventures negotiated with the University of California at Los Angeles for the funding of spinoff company Coatue Corporation, a memory chipmaker. Coatue Corporation was later sold to Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) for an undisclosed sum in 2003.
Mr. Schnel’s success with ITU Ventures started to get some notice with the successful exit from its investments in Eizel Technologies - a Carnegie Mellon University spinoff. Eizel Technologies is a software company developing applications for wireless mobile devices. In 2004, Eizel Technologies was profitably sold to Nokia for $21 million.
Jonah Schnel was also Member of the Board when ITU Ventures collaborated with other venture capital firms for the $6 million funding of Hier Design, a developer of floor planning analysis software used in semiconductor manufacturing. Hier Design - a University of California at Berkely spinoff – was sold to Xilinx Inc. in 2004.
As Managing Partner for ITU Ventures, Jonah Schnel is currently involved in the management of the firm's investment portfolio of over a dozen high-technology companies.