Mr. Christopher Brody

Mr. Christopher Brody is Chairman of Vantage Venture Partners, a private partnership with investments in a number of companies to which it also serves as an advisor. Mr. Brody was a Partner of Warburg, Pincus from 1972 to 1998, and served as a member of its Operating Committee, which manages the private equity and venture capital activities of the firm. During this period, he was involved in all aspects of the firm, including start-up technology companies, large buy-outs and the international expansion of the firm's activities. Over the past 30 years, he has served on boards of many portfolio companies, including particularly active roles as Chairman of ChipSoft (which was merged into Intuit), and a Founding Board member of the Gartner Group. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Intuit, Inc. and several privately-held companies. He was Chairman of the National Venture Capital Association and served on the Board for over 10 years. In 1999, he became the first recipient of the NVCA’s Outstanding Service Award. Mr. Brody is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. He received a B.A. from Harvard College and MBA from Harvard Business School.

Dr. Herbert Lee Buchanan III

Chairman of the Board, President, and CEO
Dr. Buchanan became the HYPRES executive chairman, President, and CEO in 2019. His distinguished career includes service as United States Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Research, Development and Acquisitions) from 1998 to 2001. In that esteemed position, he was responsible for all procurement of defense systems for both the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps. Before assuming his role at HYPRES, Dr. Buchanan was a strategic advisor and venture partner at Paladin Capital Group, where his areas of responsibility included biotechnology and cyberdefense. He has also worked in various advisor roles with Technical Communities, PA Consulting Group (US), TMD Microwave and drone delivery start-up Flytrex in Tel Aviv, Israel. Dr. Buchanan has held board positions with Lucent Government Systems, CloudShield Cyber Security Technologies, OmniCompete and other companies. An expert in transitioning technologies into public- and private-sector products, Dr. Buchanan managed multibillion-dollar programs while serving as deputy director of the Defense Advanced Research Agency from 1985 through 1998. He became a senior physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in 1979, and joined Titan Corp. as division manager three years later. Dr. Buchanan received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in electrical engineering from Vanderbilt University. His physics doctorate is from the University of California.

Mr. Franklin Pitcher (“Pitch”) Johnson

Mr. Johnson was co-founder in 1962 of Draper and Johnson Investment Company, a venture capital company, and became an independent venture capitalist in 1965 as the founder of Asset Management Company, with which he is still associated. Asset Management Company has made over 250 venture investments during its more than 46 years of operation. These have included Applied Bio Systems, Conductus, Hybritech, Octel, Qume, Red Brick Systems, Remedy, Sierra Semiconductor, Tandem Computers, Teradyne, and Verity. He has served on boards of many public companies and is a director of several private companies, including HYPRES. He is also a past director of the National Venture Capital Association, a past-president of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists, and was a trustee of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District for 12 years. He also taught a class in entrepreneurship and venture capital at Stanford Business School for 12 years and is still active on the faculty there. He has served as an advisor to several eastern European countries since 1990 in the area of entrepreneurship and privatization and has participated in the founding of three venture capital companies in the region. He holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Mr. John Levy

Mr. Levy has worked at the intersection of technology and finance for more than 35 years and since 2010 has served as the Chairman of BioLite, a distributed energy company. In 2013, Mr. Levy joined the board of goTenna, a peer-to-peer networking company. In 2011, he was named Chairman of HYPRES, a digital RF and high speed and quantum computing company. In 2012, Mr. Levy helped create and became the founding Chairman of PlusN, a carrier aggregation software company that enables mobile operators’ to expand network capacity. Also in 2012, Mr. Levy joined the investment committee of the Nathan Cummings Foundation overseeing a $450m endowment. Mr. Levy was a founding partner from 2005-2010 of L Capital Partners’ where he led investments in the technology sector and served on seven technology company boards including WiSpry, OnPATH Technologies, HiGTek, Simparel, Evogen, Peek and Peek India. From 2001-2005, Mr. Levy was a partner in the Shalom Equity Fund, a seed stage tech fund based in the United States and Israel. Prior to 2000, Mr. Levy served as founding CEO of ePlanet, a computer vision company funded by Interval Research and Intel Corp. During the mid-1990′s, Mr. Levy worked at Interval Research Corporation, a Palo Alto-based development lab sponsored by Paul Allen. Before that, he was a general partner of Ariel Securities Corp., an NASD-licensed broker/dealer specializing in venture capital and media-based investments. Since 1997, Mr. Levy has served as a board member of the Cathay Investment Fund, a private equity fund with over $1 billion invested in Chinese companies.  He also served on the boards of VisionSense, Adjungo Networks, and Ovex and was an adviser to Tseng Labs and Advanced Medical Imaging. Mr. Levy has served on the board of Bend the Arc since 1989 and was chairman of the organization from 2000-2006, overseeing the merger of two non-profit organizations. Mr. Levy received an A.B. from Amherst College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Mr. Michael Messemer

Mr. Messemer is an investor and General Manager of Asset Management Company, where he focuses on managing the venture capital portfolio. In addition to HYPRES, he serves on the board of directors at Dianomic Systems, Trucentive, SeeQC, Immungenetics, BabyPage and the Franklin and Catherine Johnson Foundation. Previously, Mr. Messemer spent 10 years in the United States Navy as an F/A-18 Hornet pilot. While serving as an instructor, he was responsible for administration of the F/A-18 air-to-air and departure/spin training syllabi. In this role, he earned special recognition from the commanding general of the Finnish Air Force for his work with Naval Air Systems Command and Boeing to upgrade and modernize the Finnish F/A-18 fleet weapons systems and training tactics. While attached to USS Nimitz, Mr. Messemer earned an Air Medal for combat missions flown in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He received a Bachelor of Science degree in Aerospace Engineering from the United States Naval Academy and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Dr. James H. Smith, Jr.

James H. Smith, Ph.D., has spent the past decade investing in technology companies for the U.S. Intelligence Community’s strategic investment fund, IQT, and continues today as a consultant for venture capital and private equity. During that time, Dr. Smith led 20 investments in the semiconductor, power, RF/software defined radio, SATCOM, and security sectors resulting in numerous acquisitions and IPOs. In addition to HYPRES, he also serves on the board of PlusN (LTE cellular carrier aggregation). He also has served on the board of Silicon Sense (semiconductor wafers). He previously held VP, engineering and Director of Technology roles with Fortune 500 companies including L-3 Communications, Honeywell and AlliedSignal. He co-founded Transparent Networks, a Silicon Valley-based developer of switches for all optical networks. Early in his career, Dr. Smith developed a number of MEMS-based technologies and components at Sandia National Laboratories. He earned his Ph.D. in engineering from Pennsylvania State University and holds 11 patents. Dr. Smith also earned an MBA and is a senior member of the IEEE.