Darwin Ventures, a private equity firm focused on venture capital, has appointed Jay Bhatti as a general partner and Zach Heilman as lead engineering manager.
"Expanding the Darwin Ventures team with Jay and Zach will allow us to focus on new opportunities in the burgeoning New York City business environment," says Peter Freudenthal, managing general partner of Darwin Ventures. "We are very excited to have Jay aboard as our new partner and Zach as our lead engineering manager. We feel that their unique skill sets will allow us to expand our existing business interests in Manhattan."
Prior to Darwin, Bhatti was the co-founder of Spock.com, the world’s leading people search engine, which was launched in 2006 and sold in 2009. In six short months after launch, Spock.com became one of the top 1,000 sites on the internet, with over 50 million monthly visits.
Heilman was previously the lead front-end engineer at Spock.com. He was responsible for user experience and front-end design at Spock, which entailed everything from how users flowed through the site, signed-up to the service, and how they responded to advertising.
Darwin Ventures has also opened a New York City office.
"We believe that the rapidly growing New York City technology ecosystem is an exciting place to expand our existing business, and in many ways it is a better place to operate than the saturated Silicon Valley market," says Bhatti. "Peter and I both moved here – from San Francisco and Seattle, respectively – to take advantage of this area and the business opportunities."
