Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Investment Partner

Edwin Kania is a Managing Partner and Co-Founder of Flagship Ventures and served as Chairman of the Board of Directors at Flagship Ventures between 2001 - 2014. Edwin has 33 years of experience in the venture capital industry.

Prior to co-founding Flagship Ventures in 2000, Edwin spent 14 years as General Partner of OneLiberty Ventures and of its predecessor firm, Morgan, Holland Ventures.

From 1983 - 1984 Edwin served as an Investment Officer at First Capital Corporation of Boston, the venture capital subsidiary of Bank of Boston and previously, as Research Associate at Harvard Business School and as General Manager at J. Cunningham, Inc.

Edwin is a frequent speaker on venture capital and entrepreneurship. Edwin earned his undergraduate degree in Physics from Dartmouth College and his MBA from Harvard Business School.

While at Dartmouth, Edwin was an All-American Track and Field athlete and a national and collegiate record holder.

Throughout his professional career, Edwin has operated both as an investor and as an active partner to entrepreneurs in company building. Edwin's direct investment experience covers over 100 companies. In addition, Edwin has been intimately involved in the launch and development of more than a dozen companies as the founding, lead or co-lead investor, and on occasion has assumed operating roles in support of management. Several of these companies are now publicly traded while others have been acquired by significant publicly-traded companies. The total value of the companies in which Ed has participated as founding or lead investor is currently several billion dollars. Among the companies for which Ed has served as an active Director are Acceleron Pharma (NASDAQ: XLRN), Adolor (NASDAQ: ADLR), Alere Corp. (purchased by Inverness Medical), Anesta Corp. (NASDAQ: NSTA, purchased by Cephalon), Aspect Medical (NASDAQ: ASPM, purchased by Covidien), AudioLogic (purchased by Cirrus Logic), ChemGenics Pharmaceuticals (purchased by Millennium), Cytyc Corp. (NASDAQ: CYTC), EXACT Sciences (NASDAQ: EXAS), Interactive Supercomputing (acquired by Microsoft), Ontogeny (merged into Curis, NASDAQ: CRIS), PerSeptive Biosystems (NASDAQ: PBIO, purchased by Applera), Somatogen (NASDAQ: SMTG, purchased by Baxter), and VisEn Medical (acquired by PerkinElmer). He was also a founding investor in IDEXX Laboratories (NASDAQ: IDXX) and in TripAdvisor (purchased by InterActive Corp).

Currently, Edwin is a Director of Flagship portfolio companies EcoSense Lighting, Oasys Water, Selecta Biosciences, TARIS Biomedical, Tarveda Therapeutics, TransMedics and Visterra, as well as on the Board of DataCore Software.

Edwin also serves on the Board of Common Impact, a non-profit organization that connects skilled professionals from global corporations to local, high potential non-profits.

Edwin has been a long-time Member of the Board of Directors of MassBio, a not-for-profit organization representing theMassachusetts biopharmaceutical industry and serves as a Member of Harvard Partners’ Innovation Advisory Board and The Johns Hopkins Medicine Alliance for Science and Technology Development.