John Pyrovolakis

Who is John Pyrovolakis?

John Pyrovolakis is the founder of the Innovation Accelerator, the private side of a public-private partnership with the National Science Foundation. The Innovation Accelerator's mission is promote our nation's economic competitiveness in the global economy by promoting our nation's economic competitiveness. John is also the managing director of the National Innovation Fund.

John founded Collegescape - a software as a service company in the education space - out of the MIT Entrepreneurship in 1996. John raised angel funding for Collegescape, which won Yahoo! Internet Life's site of the year in 1998, and was acquired by the Thomson Corporation (NYSE:"TOC") in 1998. John then founded and sold another software startup in a confidential transaction. John consulted for Jesup and Lamont Securities, Suntrust Bank, and United Health Care.

Mr. Pyrovolakis is a triple major in math, computer science, and philosophy out of NYU, where he won the school writing competition and was the first undergraduate teaching assistant in mathematic logic. From there, Mr. Pyrovolakis went to MIT for a PhD in Linguistics and Philosophy. While at MIT, Mr. Pyrovolakis did work at the Laboratory for Computer Science in automated theorem proving, and was a teaching fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Astrophysics lab, where he won the Derek Bok prize for teaching excellence.

Mr. Pyrovolakis is a judge at the MIT Entrepreneurship Competition, as well as Columbia University's and Stonybrook University's. Mr. Pyrovolakis has also served as a reviewer, and served on the “Committee of Visitors” for the National Science Foundation’s small business innovation program. Mr. Pyrovolakis has lectured at the MIT Sloan School and Columbia University on entrepreneurship and innovation, and delivered the keynote address at the 2010 Banking Technology News Summit on Mobile Banking.