Roger Novak
Managing Member @ Novak Biddle Venture Partners
Washington, United States
Roger Novak is a Series A investor at Novak Biddle Venture Partners in Washington focused on Software and Education. Roger Novak brings over 25 years of experience as a venture capitalist, "angel" investor, and operating principal. Novak Biddle Venture Partners is a premier early stage venture capital firm backed by some of the countrys most prestigious investors. Each of NBVPs first three funds are ranked in the top quartile of all venture funds forreturns.Prior to co-founding NBVP, Roger was a private investor. In 1984, he was co-founder and three-fund general partner of Grotech Partners, where he was principally focused on information technology, with two of his investments, Verity and Secure Computing, among the top 10 performing IPOs of 1995. Earlier in his career Roger led the investment banking effort at Baker, Watts & Co., where he served on the firm’s executive committee.During his career, Roger has served on many public, private and civic boards. Currently, he serves on the boards of Blackboard, Inc. (NASDAQ: BBBB) where he is lead director, SpectrumK12, Trusted Computer Solutions, Digital Signal Corporation, StackSafe, Cdigix, Intelliworks and Centrifuge Systems. He also serves on the advisory boards of several venture funds, the Department of Homeland Securitys PREDICT (Protected Repository for the Defense of Infrastructure Against Cyber Threats) advisory board, and is a member of the OSDs (Office of Secretary of Defense) DeVenCI program. He is currently a trustee of The Walters Art Museum and serves on the board of the National Venture Capital Association where he is Treasurer and a member of the Executive committee.Previous NBVP boards include LifeMinders.com, Entevo, Simplexity and N.E.W. Customer Service CompaniesOver the years Roger has served on the State of Virginias Joint Commission on Science and Technology, where he served on an advisory committee to examine the digital divide, as well as telecommunications, workforce shortages, and education issues. He also served as a member of Harvards John F. Kennedy School of Governments project to examine the funding gap between innovation and commercialization.In addition, Roger participated in President Bushs High Technology Summit at the White House. The summit was a forum of the nations top business and technology executives, who discussed strategies for a national technology agenda.A frequent speaker on venture capital, risk and innovation issues, Roger has spoken before the National Institute of Science and Technology, the World Bank/IFC, DARPA, and many other institutions. He has also advised members of Congress and government agencies, about ways the public and private sector can work together to improve the nations high-tech economy. A frequent contributor to the local and national media on technology and investment issues, Roger has appeared on The McNeil Lehrer Newshour, CNN, CNNfN, Wall Street Week and other programs.Recently, Roger was named the winner of the 2007 Early Stage East Sal Buccieri Memorial Venture Impact Award. The honor recognizes an individual who has clearly impacted early stage technology and fast growth opportunities.
- Total investments:
- 15
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 13%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Roger Novak invests in
Stages Roger Novak invests in
Countries Roger Novak invests in
Contacts
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Investment Focus
Industry
- Software 6 (40%)
- Education 4 (27%)
- SaaS 3 (20%)
- EdTech 3 (20%)
- CRM 2 (13%)
Stage
- Series A 4 (27%)
- Series C 3 (20%)
- Funding Round 3 (20%)
- Series B 2 (13%)
- Seed 1 (7%)
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
Volley
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In residence at JPMorgan Chase with >$10 million in backing from Zuckerberg Ventures, Fathom Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank (SVB); senior execs from Apple, Facebook, and Goldman Sachs; and a Silicon Valley team of machine learning and enterprise EdTech innovators from Google, the NSA and CIA, Carnegie Mellon, and Goldman, Volley (volley.com)is on mission to synthesize the world’s enterprise knowledge. The platform offers autonomous knowledge management and learning technologies for the enterprise, used in the Fortune 100 for training in cybersecurity, operational risk management, BPM, anti-fraud, corporate knowledge, sales enablement, and more. With Volley, firms accelerate time-to-expertise by automatically generating intelligent “microlearning” or "microbriefing" experiences personalized to employees or customers while pinpointing hidden knowledge gaps. Volley is the first such member of the UC Santa Cruz Center for Excellence in Data Science Research and a private sector advisor to the U.S. Advisory Committee on Artificial Intelligence. | $2.3M / Seed / Mar 10, 2016 | |
Digital Signal
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Digital Signal specializes in three-dimensional long-range facial recognition solutions for government and commercial clients. It offers enterprise biometric solutions and customized applications to suit customer needs. The company was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia. | $10.6M / Jan 22, 2015 | |
Parchment
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Parchment is an education technology company allowing learners, educators, and employers to request, verify, and share credentials through the most advanced academic credentials management system. The system has helped millions of people and thousands of schools and universities to exchange more than 15 million credentials globally. Founded in2003, Parchment Inc. is headquartered in Scottsdale, AZ, with offices in Roseville, CA, Denver, CO, Grand Rapids, MI, Toronto, ON and Washington, DC. | $35M / Series D / Mar 19, 2014 | |
SocialRadar
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SocialRadar is building technology that makes people aware of the people and connections around them. Developing leading-edge technologies in the mobile, social and location space, SocialRadar is building applications on iPhone, Android and Google Glass that will change the way people connect. | $12.8M / Series A / Jun 19, 2013 | |
Fidelis
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Fidelis has launched a Learning Relationship Management (LRM) product that is in use by public companies and major universities. We are in the early growth stages of taking our product to market and are hiring. LRM is a new category of product that fills a major void in the education technology market by helping organizations to organizecomplex learning relationships and ensure that all learners benefit from them. Student Information Systems and Learning Management Systems are essential to execute the transactions of modern education and they drive efficiency and standardization. But they do so at the expense of relationships. And we think that relationships are absolutely essential to learning. People are motivated to learn because the content is related to their long term goals. They learn in context of their relationships with peers, teachers, mentors, and a community of other learners. They learn because they want to progress and form relationships with companies and societies that require expertise and credentials. If you analyze the most pernicious problems in education from the skills gap to attrition to professional development, you’ll find inadequate learning relationships to be at the root cause of everything. Most learning organizations understand this and are trying to fill that relationship void with Customer Relationship Management software. But CRM is designed for sales and is insufficient to the task of managing learning relationships because CRMs treat the contact as a passive participant to be acted upon by sales people. Fidelis’ LRM recognizes that learners have to be active drivers of their own success and provides them a beautiful way to organize the relationships that they need to succeed. Given how important learning is to every organization, to society, and to democracy, we think that someone is going to build a multi-billion dollar company selling LRMs - we hope it's us. | $6M / Series B / May 01, 2013 | |
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Fidelis
|
Fidelis has launched a Learning Relationship Management (LRM) product that is in use by public companies and major universities. We are in the early growth stages of taking our product to market and are hiring. LRM is a new category of product that fills a major void in the education technology market by helping organizations to organizecomplex learning relationships and ensure that all learners benefit from them. Student Information Systems and Learning Management Systems are essential to execute the transactions of modern education and they drive efficiency and standardization. But they do so at the expense of relationships. And we think that relationships are absolutely essential to learning. People are motivated to learn because the content is related to their long term goals. They learn in context of their relationships with peers, teachers, mentors, and a community of other learners. They learn because they want to progress and form relationships with companies and societies that require expertise and credentials. If you analyze the most pernicious problems in education from the skills gap to attrition to professional development, you’ll find inadequate learning relationships to be at the root cause of everything. Most learning organizations understand this and are trying to fill that relationship void with Customer Relationship Management software. But CRM is designed for sales and is insufficient to the task of managing learning relationships because CRMs treat the contact as a passive participant to be acted upon by sales people. Fidelis’ LRM recognizes that learners have to be active drivers of their own success and provides them a beautiful way to organize the relationships that they need to succeed. Given how important learning is to every organization, to society, and to democracy, we think that someone is going to build a multi-billion dollar company selling LRMs - we hope it's us. | $1.8M / Apr 01, 2013 | |
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Digital Signal
|
Digital Signal specializes in three-dimensional long-range facial recognition solutions for government and commercial clients. It offers enterprise biometric solutions and customized applications to suit customer needs. The company was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia. | $10.3M / Private Equity / Jan 03, 2012 | |
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Parchment
|
Parchment is an education technology company allowing learners, educators, and employers to request, verify, and share credentials through the most advanced academic credentials management system. The system has helped millions of people and thousands of schools and universities to exchange more than 15 million credentials globally. Founded in2003, Parchment Inc. is headquartered in Scottsdale, AZ, with offices in Roseville, CA, Denver, CO, Grand Rapids, MI, Toronto, ON and Washington, DC. | $6M / Series C / Dec 11, 2011 | |
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Digital Signal
|
Digital Signal specializes in three-dimensional long-range facial recognition solutions for government and commercial clients. It offers enterprise biometric solutions and customized applications to suit customer needs. The company was founded in 2001 and is headquartered in Chantilly, Virginia. | $15M / Series C / Apr 20, 2011 | |
Centrifuge Systems
|
Centrifuge provides Interactive Analytics technology that allows analysts to connect to data, explore the data interactively and share results through collaborative analysis.Interactive Analytics (IA) brings together three modern innovations in analysis: Interactive Data Visualization, Unified Data Views and Collaborative Analysis. With IA,users can explore data at the speed of the human mind. They render data in the form of rich pictures and navigate across visualizations. With IA, users can identify important insights hidden in the data. At any point, users can publish results to the Centrifuge analytics repository while also notifying members of the analytical ecosystem of these important results. Centrifuge has been named a Cool Vendor in Analytics and BI. Visit http://a11.bz/NYHoO to view and print a complimentary copy of the Gartner report. Centrifuge is also available for a free evaluation, either as a download or online, at http://www.centrifugesystems.com/organization/tryit.php | $2M / Series A / Apr 18, 2011 | |
| See all 15 investments → | |||
Co-Investors
Novak Biddle Venture Partners provides equity financing and assistance to the management of young, information technology companies. They seek investment opportunities where the combination of ideas, dollars, experience, and relationships can create long-term, sustainable value.
Novak Biddle Venture Partners Contacts
| Name | Phone | Socials | |
|---|---|---|---|
Jack Biddle
Co-Founder and General Partner
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Roger Novak
Managing Member
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Roger Novak
Managing Member
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Andrea S. Kaufman
General Partner
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Annie Lurth
Accounting Manager
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FAQ
What does Roger Novak invest in?
Roger Novak invests primarily in Software, Education and SaaS startups, most often at Series A and Series C stage. Most of the 15 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.
How do I contact Roger Novak?
Public channels for Roger Novak include LinkedIn. 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 Roger Novak last invest?
The most recent investment recorded for Roger Novak closed in Mar 2016. Shizune tracks 15 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 Sep 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.
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