Walter M. Bird, III
Claflin Capital Management, Inc., was founded in 1978 and manages private equity investment partnerships. The firm invests in early-stage information technology, life science and specialty electronics companies located in the Northeast. Their portfolio consists of companies in the Life Sciences: biotechnology, medical devices & diagnostics, and healthcare services and IT. A partial listing of their invested companies includes: Andover.net, Hologic, Powersoft, Bitpipe, MicroE Systems, SensAble, InterSsense and Frictionless Commerce.

Mr. Bird joined Claflin Capital Management in 1996 and is a managing partner of the three most recent funds. As a managing partner, he has been responsible for twelve investments to date and currently is on the board of directors of Icebreaker, Inc., ThreeCore and Bitpipe. Previously he sat on the boards of Andover.net, NexCen Technologies, E-Travel and Linksoft, all of which were sold or went public in 1999 at premium values.

Before joining Claflin Capital, Mr. Bird spent ten years at BankBoston. While at the bank, he spent his first five years as a commercial lender in the bank’s energy division and two years managing an operational division of the bank’s commercial loan portfolio. During his last three years with BankBoston, Mr. Bird arranged capital market financings in the bank’s emerging markets investment banking group. Mr. Bird graduated from Dartmouth College in 1980 and received his MBA from the Tuck School at Dartmouth in 1986.

Ullas Naik
Globespan Capital Partners is focused on investing in IT - infrastructure, software, and services companies. Globespan was recently launched, is an independent venture capital firm, by former JAFCO Ventures senior investment team that had run JAFCO Ventures since 1996. Globespan will manage approximately $750 million, including; JAFCO America Technology Fund (JATF) Series III, the recently formed Globespan Capital Partners IV and will continue to oversee the portfolio companies of Funds I and II for JAFCO Co., Ltd.

Prior to Globespan, Mr. Naik was a Managing Director in JAFCO Venture's Boston office, where was responsible for several of the firm's software and infrastructure investments. He serves or has served on the boards of Pirus Networks (acquired by Sun Microsystems, NASDAQ "SUNW"), BladeLogic, Millennial Net and GlassHouse Technologies. Mr. Naik is also actively involved with Globespan's investments in Copan, Incipient, Silicon Dimensions, and Virtusa.

Prior to JAFCO Ventures, Mr. Naik was a Senior Vice President in the Technology Research Group at FAC-Equities/First Albany. He led the public financing of companies including IDT Corp., Critical Path, Forrester Research, Mainspring, NaviSite, and USWeb. He was an active angel investor in leading technology companies including Arbinet, Critical Path, Ecora, InterTrust, iRobot, and Thinq. In 2000, Mr. Naik was rated by Fortune magazine as a Wall Street "All Star" and by The Wall Street Journal as one the top technology analysts in the country.

Ullas began his career as the founder and operator of a specialty chemicals trading company in India. He received an MBA from Bentley College and a BS in Chemistry from Bombay University. He is involved in leadership roles with a variety of non-profit organizations including The Indus Entrepreneur (TIE) and Harbinger Partners.

Larry Grumer is Chairman of the Boston Entrepreneurs' Network & Managing Director, Technology Associates & Alliances (TAA). TAA helps early-stage technology ventures with go-to-market strategy and capital formation accelerating business and revenue model objectives by partnering with entrepreneurs to address many of the pain points that start-up companies face at seed and validation stages. TAA is a management advisory and investment firm that commercializes technology into emerging markets, for early-stage companies corporate spin-outs, and government initiatives; along licensing, corporate partnerships and take-to-market pathways.

TAA provides on-demand, and integrative product, business processes, market, sales, capital formation and management expertise needed to position companies and bring their technology research and commercial product concepts to manufacturing and marketing realities, and for business recovery.

Mr. Grumer has held profit & loss management positions at Textron (Avco), Arthur D. Little, John Brown Group, and Foster-Miller where he helped effect their business turn-around. He received a BS in Engineering and MBA with high distinction in International Marketing and Finance concentration from Northeastern University. He has held a Top Secret clearance.