Gil and Elyssa Elbaz

Gil and Elyssa Elbaz

Gil Elbaz is the Founder and CEO of Factual, a data company that enables developers, publishers and advertisers to build highly relevant mobile experiences using the context of location. Prior to Factual, Gil co-founded Applied Semantics Inc. (ASI), which developed contextual advertising products, including ASI's AdSense. Google acquired ASI in 2003, where Gil stayed on as the director of engineering, continuing to work on AdSense and other products.

In 2008, Gil founded The Common Crawl Foundation, a non-profit with the goal of democratizing access to web information to enable greater innovation in research, business and education. He continues to serve on the board there as well as on the board of the X Prize Foundation. Gil is an active angel investor. He recently co-founded TenOneTen ventures with David Waxman, and his notable investments include Climate Corporation (acquired by Monsanto for $1.2 billion), GoodReads (acquired by Amazon), Scopely, and Kaggle.

Gil earned a B.S. with a double major in Engineering & Applied Science and Economics from the California Institute of Technology.

Elyssa Elbaz manages the Elbaz Family Foundation, which supports environmental and educational causes. She is a former Assistant United States Attorney, where she was a member of the Violent and Organized Crime division. Prior to working as a prosecutor, she worked for the law firm of O'Melveny and Myers and clerked for a federal judge. She has also worked as a journalist for a number of newspapers and wire services in Los Angeles. Elyssa obtained her undergraduate degree at Claremont McKenna College and her law degree from the UCLA School of Law. She serves on the following non-profit boards: the Plastic Pollution Coalition, Claremont McKenna College and the CMC Center for Human Rights Leadership, Iridescent, Pressman Academy, Temple Beth Am and Think Beyond Plastic.