Ron Garret
Angel Investor
Redwood City, United States
Ron Garret is a seed investor in Redwood City focused on Mobile and Big Data. Ron Garret, Ph.D. is the Founder and CEO at Spark Innovations. He began his career as a researcher at the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab, where he worked on autonomous spacecraft and mobile robots for planetary exploration. His work laid the foundation for the subsequent Mars rover missions, and he became the most referenced computer science researcher inall of NASA according to CiteSeer. Ron's entrepreneurial streak was evident as early as junior high school, when he wrote his first business plan for a retail store that would sell nothing but computer software (a radical idea in 1979) and built one of the world's first computer dating services on an Apple ][+. Ron's first real startup was a company that built high-speed local area networks in the early nineties. In 2000 he left JPL to work for what was at the time an obscure Silicon Valley startup called Google, where he was the lead engineer on the first release of AdWords, and the author of the Google Translation Console, the interface by which volunteers translate Google's site content into over 200 different languages including Klingon. After the Google IPO Ron started a new career as a serial entrepreneur and independent angel investor. He co-founded three startups, most notably an on-line marketplace for charter jets called Smart Charter, which was acquired pre-launch by Richard Branson and launched as Virgin Charter. During this time he also produced and directed a full-length documentary film about homelessness. In 2008, together with Brian Singerman (now a partner at Founders Fund) Ron co-founded a small investment fund called XGYC (not to be confused with XG Ventures) which to date has an annualized IRR over 60%.
- Total investments:
- 3
- Last investment:
- Lead investor:
- 0%
Last updated:
For AI agents: llms.txt
Industries Ron Garret invests in
Stages Ron Garret invests in
Countries Ron Garret invests in
Round sizes
Contacts
| Type | Contact | Validation |
|---|---|---|
| Work email | ||
| Personal email | ||
| Work phone | ||
| Personal phone | ||
| Socials |
Round size
- Seed
- $360k–$2.1M
Investment Focus
Industry
- Mobile 1 (33%)
- Big Data 1 (33%)
- Database 1 (33%)
- Analytics 1 (33%)
- Ad Network 1 (33%)
Investments
| Company | Description | Round | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chalk Digital is an ad tech company that develops mobile advertising platform designed to promote brands, products, services, and events. The company combines geo-location and audience data with easy to use automated marketing and targeting solutions. It provides a simple yet powerful solution to not only create but also display on their mobile adcampaign to potentially thousands of mobile consumers.Chalk Digital's superior location technology allows to not only monitor and target in real-time but also to archive and retarget prior audiences. The company's mission is to democratize mobile advertising so that anyone from corporations to small business owners and real estate agents to individuals can advertise and promote their message to thousands of people throughout their community. | $900K / Seed / Sep 09, 2015 | ||
| SingleStore is a provider of a database for operational analytics and cloud-native applications. It provides global enterprises with an intelligent database that works on any cloud on-premises or as a service runs transactions and analytics at the same time and lets clients promote their business through analytics and combine semi-structured datainto a consolidated big data platform.The company was founded in 2011 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California. | $2.1M / Seed / Jul 12, 2011 | ||
| Octopart was founded by a trio of experimental physicists with a vision of a better way to find parts online. Today, over 700,000 engineers, scientists and sourcing professionals use our tools to search for parts across thousands of suppliers. We manage structured data for 30 million parts and growing. Our mission is to open up access to part datain design, sourcing and manufacturing.Like most startups, our existence depends on our innovations and hard work. Unlike many startups, Octopart has not raised any venture capital beyond Y-Combinator, and we stay in business by being profitable. | $360K / Seed / May 12, 2008 |
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FAQ
What does Ron Garret invest in?
Ron Garret invests primarily in Mobile, Big Data and Database startups, most often at Seed stage. Most of the 3 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 Ron Garret's check size?
Ron Garret typically joins rounds of $360k–$2.1M at Seed. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Ron Garret participates in.
How do I contact Ron Garret?
Public channels for Ron Garret include LinkedIn, X (Twitter) and the website linked on this profile. 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 Ron Garret last invest?
The most recent investment recorded for Ron Garret closed in Sep 2015. Shizune tracks 3 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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