Corley Phillips

Corley Phillips is the founder of American River Ventures, a $100M fund investing in early stage information technology companies. He founded the firm in 2000 and retired as Managing Director in 2008. He has been an active seed-stage investor in Northern California and Northern Nevada since 1993, both individually and in conjunction with the Sierra Angels and the Sacramento Angels, and has done much to expand the entrepreneurial activity in this region.

Prior to his activities as an investor, Mr. Phillips had a distinguished entrepreneurial career. From 1990 until its successful merger with State of the Art (NASDAQ:SOTA, now part of the Sage Group, LSE:SGE) at the end of 1994, he served as President and CEO of Manzanita Software Systems, an accounting software company based in Roseville, CA. From 1984 to 1990, he was President and co-founder of Grafpoint, a communications software company based in San Jose, California, which merged with White Pine Software (NASDAQ:WPNE, now part of Radvision, NASDAQ:RVSN). He previously held various sales and marketing positions with Envision Technology and Hewlett-Packard.

Mr. Phillips is Chairman of the Board of Synapsense, a Wireless Sensor Networking Software company based in Folsom, CA, and funded by American River Ventures, Nth Power, DFJ Frontier, Emerald Technology Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. In addition, Mr. Phillips serves on the board of Tech-Ed Networks, a technology logistics firm in Rocklin, CA. He is also Director of the Sacramento Entrepreneurship Academy, a non-profit with a mission to educate, mentor, and nurture entrepreneurs in local community, with particular emphasis on college students. In addition to numerous prior board positions with private companies and non-profits, Mr. Phillips also served on the board of CAM Commerce Solutions (NASDAQ: CADA).

Mr. Phillips holds a BSEE and MSEE from Washington University, St. Louis, and an MBA from Santa Clara University.