Barney Pell
Angel Investor
San Francisco, United States
Barney Pell is a seed investor in San Francisco focused on Software and Information Technology. Barney Pell was the co-founder, Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer of LocoMobi Inc. Barney has a long history as a leading technology innovator, product visionary, entrepreneur and angel investor based in Silicon Valley. Barney is known for being an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Mayfield, a top Venture Capital firm, which he left to becomeFounder and CEO of Powerset, which built a natural-language based search engine that read each sentence in Wikipedia and answered user queries in plain English. Microsoft acquired Powerset in 2008 to help create its new search engine, Bing. Barney then served Microsoft as Search Strategist, Evangelist, and Chief Architect for Local Search at Bing, until leaving Microsoft in September 2011 to return to the start-up world full-time.Barney also has active investor, board member, and advisory roles with multiple start-up companies and non-profits across a variety of industries. Barney is Co-Founder, Vice Chairman and Chief Technology Officer of Moon Express, a private company building autonomous robotic lunar landers to enable exploration and commercial development of the solar system. This builds on his earlier career managing advanced software technologies at NASA. Highlights of innovations during Barney’s career at NASA include mission critical software to support planning and collaboration for the Mars Exploration Rovers mission; Clarissa, the first spoken dialog system in space; and the development of the Remote Agent, the first AI system to fly onboard and control a deep space probe. Remote Agent is widely considered one of the top achievements in the history of Artificial Intelligence and was awarded NASA’s "software of the year" award in 1999. Barney is also Associate Founder and Trustee of Singularity University (SU), a new university created to educate leaders for life in a future driven by accelerating technological change.Other recent active angel investments and advisory positions include: Getaround, Robotex, Halcyon Molecular, SpaceX, and CrowdFlower. Recent start-ups that have had successful exits include: Appjet (now Google), Aardvark (now Google), Hot Potato (now Facebook), Etacts (now SalesForce.com), Movity (now Trulia), and LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional social network which recently went public after acquiring its hundred-millionth member.Barney received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cambridge University, where he was a Marshall Scholar, and his B.S. degree in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University, where he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and was a National Merit Scholar.Barney is a frequent speaker at conferences and universities. These include keynote talks at the International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, the Association for Computational Linguistics, Search Marketing Expos, International Semantic Web Conference, World Wide Web Conference, the Informational Retrieval Conference, and panels at SXSW Interactive. Barney has also spoken at the NPA and IPI conferences and has been featured in all major Parking industry magazines.
- Total investments:
- 26
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 0%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Barney Pell invests in
Stages Barney Pell invests in
Countries Barney Pell invests in
Round sizes
Contacts
| Type | Contact | Validation |
|---|---|---|
| Work email | ||
| Personal email | ||
| Work phone | ||
| Personal phone | ||
| Socials |
Round size
- Seed
- $750k–$3.4M
- Pre-Seed
- $1.5M–$1.8M
- Series A
- $1.2M–$14M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Software 6 (23%)
- Information Technology 5 (19%)
- Mobile 4 (15%)
- Machine Learning 3 (12%)
- Apps 2 (8%)
Stage
- Seed 14 (54%)
- Series A 4 (15%)
- Pre-Seed 2 (8%)
- Angel 1 (4%)
- Funding Round 1 (4%)
Country
- United States 12 (46%)
- Canada 9 (35%)
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workwolf is a recruitment services company that combines human recruiters with proprietary AI and psychometric technology to deliver predictive hiring intelligence at disruptive pricing. The company addresses a fundamental inefficiency in the $150B+ recruitment industry: traditional agencies charge 15-25% of candidate salary for subjectiveassessments with no performance accountability. Workwolf’s technology-enabled model delivers measurable quality improvements at significantly lower cost per hire. The proprietary technology platform includes two core components: Smart Resume Screening for contextual qualification matching, and Packfinder™ psychometrics for role-specific performance prediction. Unlike generic assessment tools, Packfinder™ models are calibrated using client performance data, creating organization-specific predictions that improve with scale. The business model starts at fees as low as 4% of annual salary for high-volume roles, rather than percentage-based fees of 15-25%, creating favorable unit economics for high-volume clients while maintaining strong margins through technology leverage. This pricing structure aligns incentives around retention rather than salary inflation. Target customers are mid-market companies with consistent hiring volume (2+ hires/month) across multiple locations—particularly retail, hospitality, healthcare, logistics, and call centers. These segments offer predictable demand and benefit most from Workwolf’s pattern recognition capabilities across distributed operations. The platform generates compounding data advantages: each hire provides performance outcome data that refines predictive models, creating a defensible moat as the system processes more hiring decisions within and across client organizations. Workwolf is headquartered in Toronto, Canada. | $1.8M / Pre-Seed / Dec 15, 2020 | ||
| A&K Robotics was founded on a shared belief that robotic technologies has the potential to drastically improve Their world and quality of life. They see the future with unique eyes, pushing the boundaries of robotics and seeking real-life applications of new technologies. | $1.5M / Pre-Seed / Jun 30, 2020 | ||
| Ada is a computer software company that features a chatbot-based platform that helps enterprise businesses to automate customer experience. Its platform operates through both web and mobile machine learning engine that reduces support volume and empowers customers to find answers on their own.The company was founded in 2016 and headquartered inToronto in Canada. | $14.1M / Series A / Dec 18, 2018 | ||
| Careteam is a personal care platform for patients and their family caregivers can use to care for their acutely ill, recovering or aging loved ones at home. Careteam provides a care coordination platform based on a care plan that enables healthcare providers, the patient and family caregivers a single mobile and web location to see all theinformation required to care for a person and to message the other care team members securely based on access permissions for their role. Careteam provides a virtual binder of key health information that patients can access as they transition from one heath care setting to another. Our customers are health care organizations who are responsible for the cost of caring for patient recovering at home following discharge from hospital, in the transition to community care or those aging at home. | $855K / Seed / Dec 01, 2018 | ||
| Optina Diagnostics develops technology for the early detection of disease through the eye. | $3.1M / Seed / Oct 10, 2018 | ||
| Legalpad makes work visa applications faster, easier, and better for startups by pairing smart software with human support. Legalpad solves the work visa problem for startups and helps people to pursue employment across borders, beginning with startups. Legalpad was founded by Sara Itucas. | $1.7M / Seed / Jun 15, 2018 | ||
| We have reached an inflection point in history where chronic disease is killing more people than infectious disease. Seven out of every ten deaths and 86% of the health care costs in the United States are attributable to chronic disease. There are similar statistics in other countries.Our digital therapeutics product, Transform, delivers adigital therapeutics solution specifically targeted at diabetes prevention. Digital therapeutics combines the latest advances in software, hardware, cloud infrastructure and applied behavioral psychology to deliver a platform preventive health coaching in a convenient and flexible format.In 2018, we have launched our product in Latin America and the Middle East with a vision to be the global leader in culturally diverse, technology-driven behavioral change programs. | $970K / Seed / Feb 28, 2018 | ||
| Hack Capital is a software company that helps digital companies hire, train, retain, and motivate employees to do the best work of their lives. The company is building vertically integrated systems of intelligence that will help startup companies, as they grow, to manage their scale intelligently. | $750K / Seed / Feb 13, 2018 | ||
| Currently, inline inspection in the oil and gas sector is a series of staged engineering events, designed to assess the condition of pipeline assets. It is costly, infrequent, and only addresses those lines that are within reach. In fact, it is estimated that 40% of the world’s pipelines are unpiggable. The vulnerabilities between inspections,which are typically years apart, or the inability to conduct inspections at all, puts the world’s aging pipeline infrastructure at risk. In order to address these issues, we have focused on changing the economics, the technology, and the workflow associated with inline inspection. We have introduced the industry’s first self-serve inspection model that eliminates significant engineering and downtime costs. We have developed miniature, multi sensor Pipers® technology that freely flows within any and all active pipelines, regardless of location, condition, material or configuration. This technology is capable of inspecting pipelines as small as 2 inches in diameter, and surveying for leaks, geometric defects, magnetic anomalies, and deposits in a single run. Further, we have reduced the cost of inline inspection by a factor of 10, making it possible for integrity programs to be more present, more often, across all of their assets. Finally, such accessible technology has given us the opportunity to work with a complete range of clients – large and small, private and public – resulting in rich datasets libraries that offer unprecedented contextual analysis and continuous advancement of our data analytics capabilities. Our approach provides clients with uninterrupted access to up-to-date condition-critical data, allowing them to optimize planning, decision-making, and actions. | $253.5K / Seed / Oct 01, 2017 | ||
| BrandYourself provides tools and services that help people look better online. This includes dealing with unwanted items – like an old divorce record or ill-advise tweet – as well as helping promote positive items that benefit someones career. In 2012, BrandYourself launched the first DIY online reputation management tool that walks usersthrough the process of monitoring and improving their online presence. BrandYourself also offers reputation management services for individuals and businesses with a team of in-house content creators, web developers, social media managers, brand strategists and placement specialists. BrandYourself has secured over $6 million in venture capital, including investments from prominent angel investor Barney Pell (former Head Search Strategist at Microsoft & Architect at Bing), John Galanti (former President at Hudson Valley Datanet), Ryan Holmes (CEO & Co-founder at Hootsuite) as well as firms FF Angels, New Atlantic Ventures, Zelkova Ventures, and LeFrak Investments. BrandYourself has been recognized by the White House, named a "Best Entrepreneurial Company in America" by Entrepreneur Magazine, declared "Best Online Reputation Services for Individuals" by Business News Daily and appeared on ABC's Shark Tank, where they walked away from a $2 million offer - one of the highest offers in the show's history. | $2M / Series A / Aug 04, 2016 | ||
| See all 26 investments → | |||
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FAQ
What does Barney Pell invest in?
Barney Pell invests primarily in Software, Information Technology and Mobile startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 26 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
What is Barney Pell's check size?
Barney Pell typically joins rounds of $750k–$3.4M at Seed, $1.5M–$1.8M at Pre-Seed and $1.2M–$14M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Barney Pell participates in.
How do I contact Barney Pell?
Public channels for Barney Pell include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and Facebook. For a verified work email and phone number, create a free Shizune account — contact data is searched across 20+ sources and validated before delivery, so your outreach lands in the right inbox.
When did Barney Pell last invest?
The most recent investment recorded for Barney Pell closed in Dec 2020. Shizune tracks 26 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.
Is Shizune's investor data accurate?
Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Oct 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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