| Roger Strauch is chairman of The Roda Group, an early stage venture capital group, based in Berkeley, California. The firm, co-founded in 1997 with Dan Miller, is focused on investment opportunities that address the consequences of climate change, stress on the Earth’s natural resources and the increased demand for low carbon energy. They are lead investors in mOasis, which has developed a polymer based soil amendment that increases water and nutrient retention around the roots of plants; Inventys, which has developed a post-combustion CO2 capture technology for power plants; Gridtential Energy, Inc., which has developed an advanced lead acid battery that incorporates semiconductor wafers inside the battery to greatly increase performance in energy storage applications; and Axine Water Technologies, which has developed a low cost and chemical-free solution for treating industrial wastewater.
Roger is an investor in and advisor to PicsArt and SoloLearn – mobile apps developed in Armenia. With over 80 million monthly users, PicsArt is a mobile suite of creative picture editing tools and a community of artistic content creators. SoloLearn is a mobile based code learning application, with over 1 million monthly users, providing programming language courses.
Roger is Chairman of the Board of Directors of Cool Systems, the manufacturer of Game Ready, a medical physical therapy system. He was the first CEO and former chairman of Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com), a leading search engine on the web. Mr. Strauch was a board member and former CEO of Symmetricom, a public telecommunications equipment manufacturer. He co-founded TCSI Corp., a telecom software company. As TCSI’s chairman and CEO, Mr. Strauch led the company from a start-up to a successful IPO and secondary public offering.
Mr. Strauch is a member of the Engineering Dean’s College Advisory Board of the University of California at Berkeley. He is the recipient of the Wheeler Oak Meritorious Award from the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Strauch and his wife Dr. Julie Kulhanjian have been named and honored as “Builders of Berkeley.” He is an executive member of the Board of Trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and the Berkeley Repertory Theatre. He is a Life Trustee of the Armenian Assembly of America. Mr. Strauch is a member of the Madison Council, a philanthropic advisory board to the Librarian of Congress. He is also on the Board of Trustees of the Northside Center for Child Development, a mental health social services agency in Harlem, New York City. Mr. Strauch is the Founder and Chairman of The Paros Foundation, which supports and implements humanitarian projects in Armenia focused on education, development and culture.
Mr. Strauch endowed the Roger A. Strauch Chair in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences and co-founded the William Saroyan Endowment for Armenian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.
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