TenOneTen Ventures
Early-Stage VC · Los Angeles · ~$200M AUM
Gil Elbaz
Gil Elbaz
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
FinTech · Data Analytics · AdTech · ClimateTech
From San Antonio, Texas
Gil Elbaz is a serial entrepreneur and data infrastructure pioneer who co-founded TenOneTen Ventures. His career has been defined by building foundational data and AI technologies that have shaped the modern internet. Gil co-founded Applied Semantics, the company that created the contextual advertising technology which became Google AdSense after Google acquired the company in 2003. At Google, he served as Engineering Director of the Santa Monica office, helping build out Google's presence in Los Angeles. He then founded Factual Inc., a location data platform that aggregated and organized the world's data, making it accessible and contextual. Factual merged with Foursquare in 2020, where Gil now serves as Co-Chairman. Gil also founded the Common Crawl Foundation, an open repository of web crawl data that has become one of the most important datasets in AI research — it has been used to train many of the world's largest language models, including GPT and other foundational models. Beyond investing, Gil serves on the boards of the X PRIZE Foundation and is a Trustee of Caltech. He is a member of the IAB Mobile Board.
Career Timeline
TenOneTen VenturesCurrent
Co-Founder & Managing Partner
2012–Present
FoursquareCurrent
Co-Chairman
2020–Present
Common Crawl FoundationCurrent
Founder & Chairman
2011–Present
X PRIZE FoundationCurrent
Board Member
Present
CaltechCurrent
Trustee
Present
Factual Inc.
Founder & CEO
2007–2020
Location data platform; merged with Foursquare
Google
Engineering Director, Santa Monica
2003–2007
Post-acquisition of Applied Semantics
Applied Semantics
Co-Founder & CEO
1998–2003
Created contextual ad tech → became Google AdSense
Silicon Graphics (SGI)
Database Architect
~1996–1998
MicroUnity
Senior Database Engineer
~1994–1996
Sybase
Engineer
~1992–1994
IBM
Programmer and DBA
~1990–1992
Education
California Institute of Technology (Caltech)B.S. Computer Science
Notable Investments
Writings & Appearances