Dayakar Puskoor

Dayakar Puskoor is the Co-founder and Managing Partner at Naya Ventures. A serial entrepreneur turned visionary investor, Dayakar had the foresight to launch one of the first tech focused venture fund headquartered in a post-telecom Dallas that invested in several pioneering early stage startups in cloud, AI/ML and mobile technologies in Dallas, Silicon Valley, Seattle and India. Dayakar is passionate about mentoring founding teams of startups and operates with a philosophy to Invest, Engage, Collaborate, Grow & Exit. The spirit of this philosophy has resulted in several successful mentoring of startup founders, path breaking transformation acts and winning exits for startups. “Entrepreneur investing in other Entrepreneurs”, has been Dayakar’s mantra resulting in a likeminded ecosystem of Investors, Advisors and Startups for mutual success.

Apart from his role at Naya Ventures, Dayakar is Executive Chairman at Motivity Labs, GlobalOutlook and KeepTrax, Board Member at CoreStack, FelixHealthCare, Kore.ai, Altia Systems, SnapOne, and Viviota, Board Observer at Minetta Brook and an Advisory Board Member at Boxfish and Glympse.

Previously, Dayakar owned the P&L for the Hosting & Mobility Solutions business at Microsoft. He was responsible for the incubation, development & management of new mobility and cloud solutions. He also led the $350M hosting business encompassing all product development, product management, marketing, and business development. Prior to joining Microsoft, as Founder and CEO of JP Mobile, Dayakar pioneered the industry's first mobile software company considered to be inventor of wireless email for the Palm PDA platform. He secured $55 million in financing and successfully completed its acquisition by Good Technology, later acquired by Motorola.

Dayakar began his career with Motorola. He owned the P&L for the Paging products, including all aspects of design, development, and world-wide customer support. He received the Engineering Excellence Award from management at Nippon Motorola. Dayakar is an active supporter of entrepreneurs and startups. He has been involved with the Dallas chapter of The Indus Entrepreneur (TiE) since 1999 and is currently a charter member. Among other activities, he chaired the wireless/mobility SIG of TiE, and organized a wireless seminar in partnership with Nokia, TI and others. Dayakar has also been featured in numerous publications, including Forbes, where he is a thought leader and occasional contributor. Dayakar earned a master's degree in computer science from Nova Southeastern University.