Dan Caruso
Managing Director, Caruso Ventures
Tuesday, April 30 | 4 P.M. | AERO 111
A talk with the Managing Director of Caruso Ventures on entrepreneurship, raising capital and the future of investments in aerospace and technology
Please join Mark Sirangelo as he welcomes Dan Caruso, the Managing Director of Caruso Ventures Colorado’s foremost investors and business leaders for a discussion of his career, how to raise capital for ventures and the future of investment in aerospace, space and technology.
Dan Caruso is Managing Director of Caruso Ventures, a 3x decacorn entrepreneur and an avid supporter of entrepreneurship. In 2020, Dan and Cindy Caruso founded Caruso Ventures. Current investments, many based in Colorado, include aerospace and engineering related companies such as Exum Instruments, BillGO, Genalyte, Canopy Aerospace, Radia, Boom Supersonic, Language I/O, Voyager Space Holdings, Quantum Industries, Atom Computing, Firefly, Agile Space Industries and numerous others.
Dan was the Founding Partner, Chairman and CEO of Zayo Group Holdings, Inc., where investors enjoyed a $8.5B equity exit on a $1.0B investment. Dan was a co-founding executive of Level 3 and joined Metropolitan Fiber Systems (MFS) as it began to scale. He currently serves as Chairman of the Board for Endeavor Colorado and is on the boards of Elevate Quantum and Colorado Thrives.
In 2015, Dan and Cindy established The Caruso Foundation to Support Initiatives that Inspire Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Inclusion. The Caruso Foundation supports a number of impactful organizations including the University of Colorado Boulder’s Startup Summer, Catalyze CU, and New Venture Challenge, Endeavor Colorado, Colorado Thrives and several others. Dan recently gave the commencement address for the University of Colorado Boulder MBA (2020).
Dan is a recipient of several awards including the Chicago Booth Distinguished Alumni Award for Entrepreneurship, University of Illinois Alumni Award for Distinguished Service, Colorado Technology Association’s Bob Newman Lifetime Achievement Award, University of Colorado Leeds Corporate Partner Award (Zayo), and Colorado Governor’s Corporate Citizenship Medal. He holds an MBA from the University of Chicago and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois.
Mark N. Sirangelo created and hosts the CU Future Insight Seminar Series as CU’s Entrepreneur-Scholar in Residence. He is the recent Chairman of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Innovation Board and the DoD’s Space Advisory Committee. Previously he was Special Assistant to the NASA Administrator helping to develop NASA’s return to the Moon. Mark was the founding executive and head of Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Space Systems and has served as the Chief Innovation Officer of Colorado.