Jacques F. Vallée serves as a General Partner of Euro-America Ventures, a Silicon Valley group that invests in North America and Europe, primarily in high-technology. He was born in France, where he received a B.S. in mathematics at the Sorbonne and an M.S. in astrophysics at Lille University. Coming to the U.S. as an astronomer at the University of Texas, where he co-developed the first computer-based map of Mars for NASA, Jacques later moved to Northwestern University where he received his Ph.D. in computer science. He went on to work at SRI International and the Institute for the Future, where he directed the project to build the world's first network-based groupware system as a Principal Investigator on Arpanet, the prototype for the Internet.
A venture capitalist with Euro-America since 1987, Jacques Vallée has spearheaded early-stage investments in over 60 high technology start-ups. One third of these companies reached the public markets. They include, SangStat Medical, a biotechnology firm based in Menlo Park, California and Nantes, France; Accuray, a medical device company specialized in robotic surgery; Ixys, a power semiconductor firm; and Ubique, Inc., a web teleconferencing company (acquired by AOL).
Other investments that he led for the fund include Com-21, P-Com, Harmonic Lightwaves, Regeneration Technologies and Mercury Interactive, all of which made successful IPOs on the Nasdaq market. He has also served as a director of Class Data Systems, a networking company (acquired by Cisco), and recently Alter-G, a medical device company. In Jan 2010, HandyLab was acquired by Becton-Dickinson.
Jacques is a member of the science board for the French Genopole, based in Evry (www.genopole.com) specializing in life sciences and was elected as a Trustee of the Institute for the Future (www.iftf.org). He has contributed a "Letter from California" column for Le Figaro.
Apart from his work with information technology and finance, Jacques has had a long-term private interest in astronomy, in writing fiction and in the frontiers of research, notably unidentified aerial phenomena. He also serves on the scientific advisory board of Bigelow Aerospace in Las Vegas, Nevada (www.bigelowaerospace.com). He was awarded the Jules Verne Prize in Paris for a science fiction novel in French.
Jacques and his family settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969.