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OUR TEAM
Mark Watt is a seasoned investor with a background that combines 20 years of investment, advisory, and business development experience. Mr. Watt is currently a Firefly Aerospace Board member.
Mark's had previously senior positions at William Blair & Co, TriplePoint Capital, America's Growth Capital, Merrill Lynch, and Ernst & Young. He has advised or invested in companies that have generated over $100 billion in shareholder value. Mark lives in Menlo Park with his wife and 2 daughters and devotes most of his spare time to Ironman triathlon training.
Eugene Yakovlev has a vast experience in investments and business development. Eugene joined Noosphere Ventures in 2015 and now focuses on investments in their aerospace business.
Before joining Noosphere Ventures, he held a senior position at Mariupol Commercial Sea Port and was responsible for the investment strategy of the company.
Mr. Yakovlev is engaged in seeking and valuing aerospace companies. His duties include business modeling, due diligence, peer analysis and benchmarking, analysis of exit scenarios, and negotiation with targets and partners.
Eugene graduated from Simon Kuznets Kharkiv National University of Economics majoring in the Economy of Enterprises. Later he received diplomas in CIMA Dip MA and DipIFR.
At Stanford University I studied synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and radio occultation remote sensing techniques with Dr. Howard Zebker and Dr. Ivan Linscott. Southwest Research Institute in Colorado funded my PhD program in support of the Radioscience Experiment (REX) onboard the New Horizons Mission to Pluto. I developed signal processing algorithms to retrieve atmospheric pressure and temperature profiles from radio occultation data, including data captured during New Horizons’ occultations of both Earth's Moon and Pluto.
In 2017, I withdrew from the PhD program in order to serve full-time as Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Capella Space. Capella Space, founded in early 2016, is a venture-backed aerospace company building a constellation of 36+ high-resolution SAR imaging satellites in low Earth orbit.
Shortly after Capella’s first successful satellite launch in late 2018, I left Capella and joined Noosphere Ventures as Entrepreneur in Residence focused on Noosphere’s space portfolio with an emphasis on Earth remote sensing.