Jason Franklin Ph.D.

CEO and Managing Director, WVV

Jason Franklin Ph.D. is the Founding Managing Director of WVV, a $100M VC joint venture between Advocate Aurora Health, Foxconn, Johnson Controls, and Northwestern Mutual. Dr. Franklin is an award-winning computer scientist and holds the 2012 Allen Newell Award (named after one of Artificial Intelligence’s founding father), a highly-cited researcher (2k+, H:10), co-inventor of FAWN (flash-storage array technology), and deep tech entrepreneur turned venture capitalist. He invests in companies building the future of enterprise technology.

Prior to his career in venture capital, Dr. Franklin worked as a research scientist and visiting lecturer in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University where he co-led a DARPA-sponsored cyber- security research project with $4MM in funding. He co-founded and served as CEO of a mobile security startup, Stamp Labs, that commercialized research developed while at Stanford in conjunction with two Stanford professors.

He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University where he published more than a dozen papers in top tier conferences, was awarded multiple best paper awards and top fellowships including the DHS Fellowship and the NSF Graduate Fellowship, received more than two thousand peer citations, and co-invented technology that led to the commercialization of enterprise-grade flash storage clusters and contributed to the creation of billions of dollars of enterprise value including numerous successful startups. He graduated with top honors with a double major in Computer Science and Mathematics and a minor in business from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.