Jay has over 15 years of experience investing, building and managing Internet businesses and brings broad consumer and tech expertise to BrandProject.
Jay is a Partner at BrandProject, focused on consumer internet investments. BrandProject's recent investments include companies such as Freshly, Chef's Plate, Owlet, and Ritual - All of which recently have raised total capital in excess of $30m at over $100m valuation. BrandProject has a 85% success rate in getting their seed stage portfolio companies a significant A round investment.
Prior to becoming a VC, Jay was the co-founder of spock.com, the world’s leading people search engine. In 6 short months after launch, it became one of the top 1000 sites on the Internet and was covered by publications including The Wall Street Journal, Time Magazine, Forbes, Newsweek, ABC News, NBC, and the Financial Times. After raising over $12m in venture and growing the company to 40 engineers, Spock was sold in May of 2009 at which time it was generating over 90 million monthly searches.
Prior to Spock, Jay was a product manager at Microsoft, managing Global server marketing and service support. Earlier in his career, while at Accenture, Jay built trading systems for the major trading firms on Wall Street.
Jay has been featured on ABC News, Time Magazine, Back Cover of Entrepreneur Magazine, CNN, and Forbes. Jay is also a contributing author for Business Insider and Fast Company. His articles can be read at www.businessinsider.com/author/jay-bhatti