Elisa Jagerson is a Managing Director at Wildcat where she focuses on investments in Climate Tech SaaS solutions that reduce the effects of climate change. Her specific areas of interest include AI and Machine Learning (ML) enabled platforms that create disruptive levels of foresight into a future perceived to be unpredictable.
Elisa traces entrepreneurship and a proud tradition of coloring outside of the lines through both her parents and all four of her grandparents. With their inspiration, she started her first venture at 8 selling eggs door to door, and she drove her first successful petition at 13 to establish recycling at MA High. In her free time, Elisa now enjoys merging those original passions for launching products and social impact by supporting entrepreneurs in nonpartisan democracy reform and justice efforts. A sports fan like her fellow Wildcat partners, but mostly when someone she loves is on the team.
Elisa was most recently CEO of FutureBrand Speck, best known for driving product and service innovation to both market disrupters and industry leaders. Organizations turned to Elisa and her teams of brand, product, environment and service designers when they needed to accelerate or ‘future proof’ growth. These products sit today inside our pockets, bodies, hospitals, cars, and data centers, and have generated billions in revenue. After pioneering ‘experience engineering’, a next generation design thinking methodology credited with infusing reliability into the innovation process, Elisa sold Speck Design to FutureBrand (NYSE: IPG), where she then served on the global leadership team. Earlier in her career as Founder and CEO of PartsRiver, Elisa pioneered early intelligent data management (IDM) in the transportation industry. There she acquired $150M in assets from Saqqara and CDC (a Boeing subsidiary), growing PartsRiver into the leading provider of IDM. Following her success at PartsRiver, Elisa launched and ran Bay Laurel Capital, a micro-cap leveraged buyout firm affiliated with AI LLC. Elisa began her finance career in global emerging markets, making investments at New York-based private equity firm Zephyr Management and Harare-based ZPF.
Elisa received a BA Cum Laude from Princeton University and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
