Overview

Gender

male

Investor Type

Angel

Investor Stage

Seed

Raul Fernandez is a Special Advisor to General Atlantic Partners, a growth equity firm with over $17 billion under management. General Atlantic provided the growth capital for Mr. Fernandez’s first start-up, Proxicom, in 1996. He has been a Special Advisor and limited partner with General Atlantic since 2000.

Additionally, Mr. Fernandez is Vice Chairman of Monumental Sports & Entertainment, a private partnership that owns the NBA’s Washington Wizards, the NHL’s Washington Capitals, and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics and owns and operates the Verizon Center in Washington, DC. As part of his role with Monumental, Mr. Fernandez serves as the alternate representative on the NBA’s Board of Governors for the Washington Wizards. Monumental Sports & Entertainment operates in the nation’s fifth-biggest media market and is one of the largest integrated sports and entertainment companies in the country.

Raul Fernandez started his technology career when he founded Proxicom in 1991, with $40,000 of his savings. With 4 engineers at the start, Proxicom specialized in custom object-oriented software development work for corporate and government clients.

Working as a software developer on NeXT computers, the company grew quickly and was very well positioned as a leading edge multi-disciplinary development organization at the beginning of the internet boom. With early customers like Netscape, AOL, MCI, and GE, Proxicom was able to position itself very effectively as a one-stop shop for the development of business-to-business and business-to-consumer websites. With a vertical industry market focus and a concentration on business-to-business sites, Proxicom enjoyed a tremendous amount of growth in the 1996 to 2001 timeframe.

The company went public in 1999 and ultimately sold in 2001. At the time of the sale, Proxicom had grown profitably to more than $200 million in revenue, offices in the US and Europe, and had close to 2000 employees. Mr. Fernandez sold Proxicom to Dimension Data, a UK-listed technology company based out in South Africa. Mr. Fernandez served as Proxicom’s CEO and Chairman from 1991 to 2001.

Currently, Mr. Fernandez also serves on the board of Fifth and Pacific (formerly known as Liz Claiborne), EXP (formerly TROW), and ValueOptions, the nation’s largest independent behavioral healthcare company.

Fernandez, a native Washingtonian, is an active philanthropist in DC regional non-profits, focusing his energy primarily on educational reform. In 2000, he co-founded Venture Philanthropy Partners, a philanthropic investment organization based out of Washington, DC. Fernandez sits on various non-profit boards, including America’s Promise, the DC College Access Program (DC-CAP), the DC Public Education Fund, Fight for Children, and the Fernandez Foundation.

He holds a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of Maryland.