Indu Navar

Over the past 20 years, Indu has served as CEO, founder, board member, and investor of several Silicon Valley software companies, during which she led the development of innovative products resulting in successful exits. In 2019, after she lost her husband to ALS, a neurological disease, she has focused on bringing her skills in building scalable platforms and technology innovations to patient-driven health ventures. Since 2019, Indu has been CEO and founder of the Peter Cohen Foundation, which functions as EverythingALS.org, a 501(3) non-profit organization focused on technology-based solutions to the discovery of biomarkers for neurological diseases. EverythingALS brings together researchers and providers from esteemed institutions as well as patients to conduct research and openly share data for potential treatments and a cure for ALS, with implications for other neurological diseases. In addition, Indu is a board member of Global Genes, a non-profit organization, whose mission is to connect, empower and inspire the rare disease community and on advisory board of Answer ALS, a non-profit focused on creating open data platform in ALS. Indu is focused on bringing the technology framework from Peter Cohen Foundation into larger rare disease communities. Earlier, Indu was managing director at Woodside Capital Partners, where she played an instrumental role in advising software companies on strategic financing transactions and M&A. She advised Inmage (Acquired by MSFT.), KarmaSphere (Acquired by FICO.), Total Immersion (Acquired by Qualcomm.). From 2001 to 2014, she was founder and CEO of Serus Corporation, provider of SAAS platform for companies with outsourced manufacturing. Serus was acquired by a public company, E2Open. Early in her career, Indu was on the ground floor of several successful technology companies, including WebMD (formerly Healtheon) and Silicon Graphics. She started as an engineer at NASA in Moffett Field. Indu has B.S Electrical Engineering from Bangalore University, India and M.S. in Computer Science from California State University, Chico.