Gil Elbaz

Overview

Gil Elbaz is an accomplished entrepreneur and angel investor specializing in technology and data-driven companies. He co-founded Applied Semantics Inc. (ASI) in 1998, which developed contextual advertising products, including AdSense. In 2003, Google acquired ASI, and Elbaz became Director of Engineering for Google's Santa Monica office, continuing to work on AdSense and other products. In 2007, he founded Factual Inc., an open data platform that provides access to definitive global data for powering web and mobile apps, mobile advertising, and enterprise solutions. Factual's first offering is its Global Places suite of data and APIs, which provides access to more than 58 million places in 50 countries along with entity mapping, resolution, and geo ad-targeting services. Elbaz is also the founder and chairman of The Common Crawl Foundation, a non-profit with the goal of democratizing access to web information to enable greater innovation in research, business, and education. He serves on the board of trustees for the X Prize Foundation and is an active angel investor. Notable investments include Climate Corporation (acquired by Monsanto for $1.2 billion), GoodReads (acquired by Amazon), Scopely, and Kaggle (acquired by Google). Elbaz earned a B.S. with a double major in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics from the California Institute of Technology. He is also a Young Alumni Trustee to the Caltech Board of Trustees. Elbaz's investment strategy focuses on early-stage technology companies that leverage data and innovative applications to disrupt existing industries or create new categories. He seeks to invest in information technology, media, enterprise software, analytics, and big data-based companies operating in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Silicon Valley. His portfolio includes companies across various sectors, such as software, internet, data, advertising, media, e-commerce, fintech, healthtech, edtech, proptech, agtech, cleantech, mobility, and logistics. As a philanthropist, Elbaz is committed to supporting environmental and educational causes through the Elbaz Family Foundation. He is also involved in Los Angeles Social Ventures Partners, an organization of professionals who donate money, time, and expertise to help Los Angeles area nonprofits. Elbaz's dedication to open information and innovation is evident in his support for organizations like public.resource.org and his leadership in the Common Crawl Foundation, which has laid the foundation for many advances in AI, including projects like GPT, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E.