Eric Di Benedetto

Eric Di Benedetto serves as a Founder and Angel Investor at Active Starts. He founded the firm in 2006 by initiating a professional angel investment program in 2003. Di Benedetto is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Convergence Partners. He has over 16 years of Silicon Valley venture capital experience as an investor in software start-ups for the enterprise, mobile applications, and digital media. Eric has invested in over 40 companies as a venture capitalist or as an angel investor since 1991. His investments have already led to ten public offerings and four sales to public companies. Di Benedetto has been an angel investor in several companies. Before co-founding Convergence Partners in 1997, he was the Managing Director of United States venture capital funds managed by BANEXI. Prior to his venture capital career, Di Benedetto was a workout and restructuring specialist at PARGESA/Lambert Brussels Group and a Mergers and Acquisitions Associate covering defense electronics at Deutsche Bank (formerly Bankers Trust Company). His career as a software investor started in the early 1990s with the client-server technology wave. Eric currently serves on the Advisory Board of Asia-Silicon Valley Connection. He served on the Boards of ten Convergence Partners investments. Di Benedetto sits on the Boards of Directors of Clickability, IdeaBlade, Plastyc, RapLeaf, and served as the board member at RateItAll. He was profiled in Business Week "Go West, Young Whiz" in March, 1998 and in The European "Where the Brains Drain" in June, 1998. Di Benedetto lectured M.B.A. students of the University of St. Gallen Switzerland on venture capital. In December 2003, he presented his analysis of the potential of success of French technology start ups to the venture capital industry in Paris. More recently, Di Benedetto was invited to present on "Connecting China and the Valley" at the China Connect conference in Beijing, China in October, 2004. He is a supporter of Singularity University. Di Benedetto holds an M.B.A. from ESSEC, Paris, France and a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics.