Currently he is helping top launch several new companies for oithers including TeraDisc, a venture emerging from Virginia Tech and Duke University. He is also advisor to a number of emerging ventures and is a partner in an emerging seed venture capital fund.
In 1989, after spending 10 years working in the aerospace industry at Westinghouse, Ed left the corporate world to become an entrepreneur. His first venture was ConQuest, a search engine company based on Artificial Intelligence, where he was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" in 1994 by the Information Industry Association. After achieving #51 on the National Fast 500, ConQuest merged with Excalibur (now Convera) in 1995 in a $33M transaction. This venture returned up to 70X for it's investors.
After a brief transition period at Excalibur, Ed founded Powerize.com, a business information portal on the web. After acquiring the content services "IBM Infomarket" and "Lotus Newsstand" from IBM, Powerize.com was merged with Hoovers in 2000 in a $22M transaction. Hoovers has since merged with Dunn and Bradstreet.
Ed is also an Adjunct Professor for Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches "online" courses including New Technical Ventures as well as courses in Computer Science and Bioinformatics. He is author of the new ventures book called Leveraging the Horizon about building seed stage companies.
After completing a BSEE from Virginia Tech , Ed completed extensive graduate studies while at Johns Hopkins, including two MS degrees (EE and BME), a PhD (CS), and post doctoral studies (BME). He also completed a fellowship year in Artificial Intelligence at MIT.
Ed Addison launches and advises new high tech ventures in both Information Technology and Biotechnology. He is an Adjunct Professor with Johns Hopkins University.