Michael Ferrari is a principal on the investment team at In-Q-Tel, the US intelligence community’s non-profit strategic venture investment unit. He was an officer in the US Marines for 12 years, a helicopter pilot and a weapons and tactics instructor both in the US and overseas.
Currently, he works under In-Q-Tel’s managing partner George Hoyem, who said: “I am aware that Mike organised a group of nine combat veterans, some of whom Mike had the honour to serve with, and the misfortune to share the bond of losing mutual friends to war or accident. He formed a non-profit called the Dog Tag Brewing Foundation that works directly with the families of fallen US service people, to build the legacies of their fallen warriors and to inspire America to support those legacies.
“The healing vehicle they leverage is a beer, brewed in partnership with Pabst Blue Ribbon [a lager beer sold by US-based Pabst Brewing Company], called Legacy Lager.”
Ferrari has also worked in tech on the advisory and financing side at investment bank Goldman Sachs. He said he soon realised that being mission-oriented was an innate part of his identity.
During his two and a half years at In-Q-Tel, Ferrari has led 10 deals, only two of which have been announced – SigOpt, a startup backed by VC firm Andreessen Horowitz with expertise in advanced artificial intelligence, machine learning and optimisation, and Fugue, a cloud orchestration platform that automates the enforcement of an infrastructure state and monitors any drift from that state.
