# David Gardner

> David Gardner is a seed investor at Hologruf backing Software and Information Technology. See 28 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Hologruf](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/hologruf-inc)
- Location: Raleigh, United States
- Total investments: 28
- Last investment: Jan 2026
- Lead investor: 61%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidgardner4
- Website: http://cofounderscapital.com

David Gardner is a serial entrepreneur, writer, adviser and very early stage investor with nearly thirty years of experience in creating and building software technology companies.Before founding Cofounders Capital he was the Triangle’s most active and involved angel investor with over $7M personally deployed in early stage ventures. As anadviser, David spent all of his time working as a full-time unpaid coach and mentor to startup companies usually in the software space.As an entrepreneur, David has been the founder or cofounder of multiple successful companies in the Triangle including PeopleClick which was purchased for $100M and Report2Web which sold for $12M in less than eleven months from inception. He has demonstrated a record for consistency across multiple industries and markets with six successful exits in a row.As a senior executive, David served as a Vice President for Compuware, a billion dollar Fortune 1000 corporation, after it acquired ProviderLink, a healthcare communications exchange he founded.As a writer and thought leader, David is author of a popular book on entrepreneurship called, The StartUp Hats. He has published many articles and forward thinking white papers on technical, marketing and managerial topics. David founded and launched the first hosted software-as-a- service enterprise application in NC long before the SaaS model was recognized as a viable architecture or best practice.As a lifelong learner, David is constantly researching new technologies and challenging traditional ways of thinking. In addition to several years of full time computer science and business related post graduate studies at NCSU, he holds degrees in Music and Philosophy with a post graduate concentration in theology and dead languages.What drives David today is his passionate for helping smart, coachable first-time entrepreneurs, watching them succeed and witnessing their life-changing exits.

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 10 | 36% |
| Information Technology | 8 | 29% |
| SaaS | 7 | 25% |
| Analytics | 5 | 18% |
| Health Care | 4 | 14% |

68 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 17 | 61% |
| Series A | 3 | 11% |
| Series B | 2 | 7% |
| Angel | 1 | 4% |
| Funding Round | 1 | 4% |

6 stages tracked in total.

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Titl | To make real estate simple, secure, and fast. We're cutting out the paperwork, legal hurdles, and delays that make buying, owning or selling a home difficult. Using the most advanced technology, we bring transparency and peace of mind to every transaction. With Titl, you get a modern, easy way to handle property—built for today, ready fortomorrow. | $2.5M | Seed | Jan 14, 2026 |  |
| Left Main REI | Left Main REI provides a CRM system for real estate investors and agents. It optimizes lead intake to buy or sell more homes. | $1.5M | Seed | May 12, 2025 |  |
| TEDU | TEDU is an education technology company with an enterprise platform built to integrate and partner with universities and other educational institutions worldwide to provide them and their students a suite of out-of-classroom academic resource utilities. TEDU's technology offering is a hybrid B2B, B2C, and C2C platform that improvesstudents' access to their university academic resource systems while also providing universities in-depth data and analytics to fine-tune their business. The FERPA compliant TEDU platform replaces outdated, costly, and inefficient academic support infrastructure with sophisticated software solutions that generate valuable data and analytics while servicing students 24/7. The data and analytics collected from the TEDU platform provide impactful insights to adjust curriculum and teaching methodology for a more efficient learning experience. This 360-degree approach allows students to receive academic assistance from their university at any time and any place, not just during available business hours. TEDU's primary target markets are universities worldwide that consistently need to improve their academic offerings to stay competitive in the education environment while also improving their students' retention and performance rates to continue receiving funding. | $2M | Seed | Aug 08, 2024 |  |
| PETE | PETE is an AI-powered learning platform that enhances training effectiveness by expediting course creation, providing a cost-efficient, customizable, and learner-adaptive solution. | $2M | Seed | Apr 09, 2024 |  |
| Element451 | Element451 empowers admissions and enrollment teams to work more efficiently as they develop stronger, more personalized engagements with prospective students.The admissions marketing and enrollment CRM is easy to use (no one has time for complicated software) and cloud-based (no one works from the same desk on the same device every day). And atits core are two of the most important ingredients for working smarter: automation and analytics.Element451 grew out of making custom enrollment technology solutions for clients of our sister-company and higher-ed marketing firm, Spark451. Now those solutions are available to schools of all sizes and budgets in a single platform that features everything needed to bring in a class. | $3.5M | Series B | Oct 11, 2022 |  |
| biospatial | Biospatial is a company building a national collaborative to provide early warning of health events and trends. The company's mission is to build a national network of data partners and operational users to support public health preparedness, enable an informed emergency response, and strengthen national security.Founded in 2017, Biospatialis headquartered in Durham, North Carolina. | $3.4M | Series A | Mar 28, 2022 |  |
| Ecobot | The Nature Tech platform that predicts our future by collecting real-time field data. Ecobot is a cloud-based SaaS platform that currently enables customers in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry to speed construction starts by optimizing mandatory environmental permitting. Ecobot enables its customers to leverage fielddata collected during permitting into massive improvements throughout the construction lifecycle. | $2M | Seed | Dec 23, 2021 |  |
| Automation Intellect | Automation Intellect is a SaaS company that is improving industrial machine performance using data analytics.It is an asset performance management platform leveraging IIOT, cloud, and analytic capabilities. The solution provides visibility into asset performance that helps drive immediate improvements in output, downtime, and quality.BradDeMarco founded the company in Matthews, North Carolina in 2016. | $1.8M | Venture - Series Unknown | Oct 21, 2021 |  |
| Element451 | Element451 empowers admissions and enrollment teams to work more efficiently as they develop stronger, more personalized engagements with prospective students.The admissions marketing and enrollment CRM is easy to use (no one has time for complicated software) and cloud-based (no one works from the same desk on the same device every day). And atits core are two of the most important ingredients for working smarter: automation and analytics.Element451 grew out of making custom enrollment technology solutions for clients of our sister-company and higher-ed marketing firm, Spark451. Now those solutions are available to schools of all sizes and budgets in a single platform that features everything needed to bring in a class. | $3M | Series A | Apr 22, 2021 |  |
| Ecobot | The Nature Tech platform that predicts our future by collecting real-time field data. Ecobot is a cloud-based SaaS platform that currently enables customers in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry to speed construction starts by optimizing mandatory environmental permitting. Ecobot enables its customers to leverage fielddata collected during permitting into massive improvements throughout the construction lifecycle. | $750K | Seed | Apr 06, 2021 |  |

10 of 28 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Cultivation Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/cultivation-capital) — VC Fund, 4 deals together
- [IDEA Fund Partners](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/idea-fund-partners) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [RTP Capital Associates](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/rtp-capital-associates) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [SaaS Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/saas-ventures-2) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Alerion Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alerion-ventures) — VC Fund, 1 deal together
- [Arsenal Growth Equity](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/arsenal-venture-partners) — VC Fund, 1 deal together

## About Hologruf

VC Fund · Cary, United States

Hologruf Inc. specializes in design and develop 3D holographic displays using the proprietary patented technology .

2 contacts available at Hologruf.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| David Gardner | Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/david-gardner-3 |
| Ted Meng | CEO | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/ted-meng |

## Similar investors

### Similar stage
- [Antler](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/antler-be9c) — VC Fund
- [Alumni Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alumni-ventures-group) — VC Fund
- [Right Side Capital Management](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/right-side-capital-management) — VC Fund

## FAQ

### What does David Gardner invest in?

David Gardner invests primarily in Software, Information Technology and SaaS startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 28 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### When did David Gardner last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for David Gardner closed in Jan 2026. Shizune tracks 28 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 Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

# About Shizune
Shizune.co is an investor database. Core features:
- 48,091 startup investors (angels, VCs, accelerators, and others)
- Email, phone, LinkedIn (for intros), socials, and other contact data
- Updated daily from public funding news
- CSV and Excel export

The User can access the full database FOR FREE after signing up: shizune.co