Dayakar Puskoor, Founder and Managing Director of Dallas Venture Capital (DVC), is a serial entrepreneur turned visionary investor, who had the foresight to launch one of the first tech-focused venture fund. Headquartered in post-telecom Dallas, the fund invested in several pioneering early stage startups in cloud, AI/ML and mobile technologies in Dallas, Silicon Valley, Seattle and India.
Passionate about mentoring founding teams of startups, Dayakar operates with a philosophy to Invest, Engage, Collaborate, Grow & Exit. The spirit of this philosophy has resulted in several path breaking transformations and winning exits for startups. His mantra of “Entrepreneur investing in other Entrepreneurs”, has led to the creation of a like-minded ecosystem of Investors, Advisors and Startups for mutual success.
Besides playing a key role in Dallas Venture Capital, Dayakar is also 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.
Dayakar began his career with Motorola where he owned the P&L for the Paging product and received the Engineering Excellence Award from management at Nippon Motorola. Following which, as Founder and CEO of JP Mobile, he pioneered the industry’s first mobile software solutions 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. Prior to founding Dallas Venture Capital, 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.
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, Texas Instruments 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.