Manisha Advani

Manisha Advani

Manisha Advani is a Computer Engineer currently working at Microsoft. She previously started her dance school, Liveanklets, imparting Indian classical dance education to children and adults. Manisha is passionate about supporting education, health and the performing arts in the local community and in the world. She is on the board of several non-profits in the Seattle area such as the Bellevue Schools Foundation, API Chaya, University of Washington’s Meany Center for the Performing Arts as well as the University of Washington Dream Project’s Capital Campaign. She is also connected to non-profits in India that serve children with special needs. Manisha is well-known in the Seattle non-profit community for her fundraising and community building skills. She is constantly trying to get non-profits visibility and engage the local community with different non-profits.

Brian Aborgast

Brian Aborgast

Brian Arbogast is currently the Director of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Water, Sanitation & Hygiene program, where he leads the foundation’s effort to bring groundbreaking innovations in sanitation technology and new ways to deliver sanitation products and services to people in the developing world. Brian came to the Foundation following a 20+ year career with Microsoft where he served most recently as a Corporate Vice President, responsible for delivering the mobile services strategy, platform, and experiences for Windows Live and Windows Mobile, as well as the strategy, platform, and integrated services for network operators. These R&D efforts spanned campuses in the U.S., China, Israel, and Portugal. Prior to 2000, Brian managed the teams which developed the core technologies behind Windows Live Hotmail, Messenger, calendar, contacts, storage, VoIP, and online identity services when these were the highest-scale services in the world, growing from 150 million to over 500 million users. Earlier roles included running Visual Studio from 1997 to 2000 and Access from 1994 to 1997, and working as a lead developer on Access 1.0.

Brian has also been an active angel-stage impact investor in the clean energy sector since 2007, and joined Northwest Energy Angels in 2010. He is also a founding board member of the Progress Alliance of Washington, which organizes a community of donors to make strategic investments in progressive social and political change in Washington State, and of Fuse, which uses online communications and grassroots organizing to give people a stronger voice in Washington State government. Brian holds a B.Math in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from the University of Waterloo and a Certificate in Sustainable Business from the Bainbridge Graduate Institute.

Brian Boland

Board member since 2020

Brian Boland

Board Member

Brian Boland is the co-founder of the Delta Fund, along with his wife, Katie. The Delta Fund invests time and energy into organizations that demonstrate measurably successful and scalable programs focused on poverty alleviation and justice reform.

Brian was also a Vice President at Facebook, where he oversaw strategy, operations and engineering teams working on a broad array of Facebook products and services. He worked there for 11 years.

Prior to joining Facebook, Brian spent time as an entrepreneur, working at an agency and in product roles at Microsoft. Brian holds a bachelor’s degree in philosophy.

Caroline Bressan

Board member since 2019

Caroline Bressan

Board Member

Caroline Bressan is the Director of Social Investments at Open Road Alliance, which she joined in 2015. She leads Open Road’s Social Investment team where she manages both the grant and the Open Road Ventures loan portfolios, funding unexpected roadblocks for non-profits and social enterprises.

Prior to Open Road, Caroline was an Investment Principal at Dalberg Capital, the investment advisory wing of Dalberg. There she focused on D. Capital’s impact investment advisory offerings, building a pipeline of investment opportunities in Sub Saharan Africa, specifically in energy and agriculture. Caroline also worked on the design and structuring of innovative financing mechanisms, including impact bonds and social impact insurance.

Previously, Caroline was an Investment Officer at Calvert Impact Capital (formerly Calvert Foundation) where she managed its $20 million portfolio mainly focused on Latin America. At Calvert, she originated and managed a pipeline of lending and investment deals focused on the sustainable trade, social enterprise, and financial inclusion sectors. Caroline received her MBA from Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and holds a Bachelor in Business Administration from the University of Michigan. She speaks English and Spanish. Caroline is also the chair of the board of the social enterprise, InspiraFarms.

Anurag Chandra

Anurag Chandra

Anurag Chandra has been an active member of the Silicon Valley technology and venture capital community for over 15 years. Prior to joining NXT, he was Managing Partner of Gresham Partners, where he advised early-stage to mid-market technology companies seeking operational scale and several VC/PE funds on fundraising, fund management and deal flow.

Prior to that, Anurag served as a Managing Director at the Galleon Crossover Fund, where he focused on late-state equity investments in pre-IPO companies, and at Lighthouse Capital Partners, where he led investments in more than 40 companies and played a key role in managing a $366 million early and late-stage venture debt fund. Some of Anurag’s successful exits include Responsys (IPO), Airespace ($450 million sale to Cisco), Ironport ($830 million sale to Cisco), Vontu ($350 million sale to Symantec) and Modulus Video (sale to Motorola).

Before becoming an investor, Anurag held several leadership and operating roles in startups. In 2007, he cofounded De-Fi Mobile Ltd. and was an early board member. He also served as Vice President of Business and Corporate Development for Intraspect Software, Inc., which was acquired by Vignette Corporation, and as Vice President of Finance and Operations for NetDialog, Inc., which was acquired by Kana Communications. He was also an early advisor to Solazyme, Inc., a microbial photosynthesis company with renewable energy and biomaterials applications, which went public in 2011.

Anurag was recognized in The Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 under 40” feature in 2005. He is a graduate of Loyola Law School, where he was a St. Thomas More scholar, and earned a B.A. with honors in Economics and Political Science from Stanford University.

Among other activities, Anurag has been a lecturer at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and an academic advisor to several freshmen at Stanford. He is involved with social impact investing funds, serves on the board of directors for the Menlo-Atherton Little League and coaches an AAA team. Anurag lives in Silicon Valley with his wife and two children. His hobbies include reading and playing golf.

Kumar Ganapathy

Board Member since 2022

Kumar Ganapathy

Board Member

Kumar Ganapathy believes in the power of entrepreneurship to positively impact the world. He has been a serial technology entrepreneur  and angel investor for over 25 years in Silicon Valley.  Recently, he is a founder and Managing Director of 3iPartners, an early stage impact fund that invests in promising social entrepreneurs in India in the areas of Agriculture, Livelihood, Education and Healthcare. 3iPartners’ mission is to enable societal change through entrepreneurship, and has invested in 10+ impact startups in India over the past 2 years. He is an investor and board advisor to Peopleshores (creating tech jobs to underprivileged communities in the US), has recently joined the board of Upaya Ventures, and is associated with other nonprofits in the Bay area and India.

Kumar has founded multiple successful start-ups over the past 25 years across Telecom and Enterprise IT infrastructure : (i) VxTel (acquired by Intel in 2001) for Voice-over-IP carrier technology, (ii) Virident (acquired by Western Digital in 2013) for high-performance flash storage technology, (iii) Enterprise labs, a “foundry” for Enterprise Cloud startups, where he helped launch multiple companies (Akridata, PrimaryIO, Ampool, DeepVision) over the past 5 years. He is currently Chairman of Akridata (Visual AI Platform) and board member at Position2 (Digital advertising), and angel investor in a number of tech startups. Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Kumar was Principal Engineer and Fellow of Conexant and Rockwell Semiconductor.

Kumar has received his Ph.D from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), MS from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, Fellow of Conexant/Rockwell, and Siemens Gold medal winner at IIT. Kumar has over 75 patents and 12 technical publications.  He loves to ski with his wife and two children, as well as hike and travel with friends and family.