Winslow Sargeant

Managing Director
Venture Investors
Madison. WI

Winslow Sargeant is a managing director  with Venture Investors, an early stage venture capital firm based in Madison, Wisconsin.  From 2001 to 2005, he was the program manager for the Small Business Innovations Research (SBIR) program Electronics topic in Industrial Innovation, a new office in the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Engineering Directorate. The SBIR program invests more than $100M per year in seed and early stage technology companies.

From 1997 to 2000, Winslow cofounded Aanetcom, a startup company with seed funding from Cisco systems.   He served as the chief Analog architect who developed the novel/patented clock synthesis for the SErializer/DESerializer (SERDES) chipsets.   Aanetcom was the first to develop an Octal SERDES  (OctalPhy) designed in 0.25um CMOS technology.  On March 3, 2000, Aanetcom was acquired by PMC-Sierra for $900M.

From 1995-1997, Winslow served as a Member of the Technical Staff at AT&T Microelectronics/ Lucent Technologies (Allentown, PA).  He developed high-speed mixed signal circuits in CMOS/BiCMOS for Mass Storage, Ethernet, and Broadband applications.  He served on the Lucent’s patent committee.

From 1992-1995, Winslow served as Staff Engineer at IBM Research (Yorktown Heights, NY) and IBM’s AS/400 facility (Rochester, MN).   He work on a 10 Gb/s 20 channel parallel optical transmitter using vertical cavity self-emitting lasers (VCSELs) and a 20-channel parallel optical receiver array using Metal Semiconductor Metal (MSM) photodiodes using Vitesse’s GaAs foundry process.  The MSM technology was successfully developed and sold to Vitesse Semiconductor.

Winslow is a  Kauffman Fellow (Class 11), member of IEEE, New York Academy of Sciences, Sigma Xi, and the Northeastern University Corporation. He serves as a Director of the University of Wisconsin Foundation, Trustee for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation (WARF), Advisory Board Member for the University of Wisconsin Astronomy Department, and Trustee for the IEEE History Center.   He also serves as a Technical Advisory Board member for Startup Company Intersymbol Communications, Madison-based venture firm Venture Investors, LLC, Managing Member of Xcelis Communications, LLC, and is an Advisory Board member for the Maryland Venture Fund. He has received the inaugural 2002 Wisconsin Distinguished Young Alumni Award and was the 2003 Outstanding Engineering Alumni Awardee from Northeastern University.

Winslow works with early stage technology companies in developing commercialization strategies. He has worked as a due-diligence consultant for teir-1 Venture Capital firms.  Since 2000, he has held the title of Associate Adjunct Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he works with graduate students in the area of RF/MEMs and Integrated circuit design.

He received the B.S. (Northeastern 1986), M.S. (Iowa State 1988), and Ph.D. (Wisconsin 1995), all in Electrical Engineering.

Winslow@ventureinvestors.com