Aaron Easterly

Aaron Easterly is a seasoned technology executive and entrepreneur best known as the co-founder and longtime CEO of Rover, the world's largest online marketplace for pet care. He earned an A.B. in Economics with honors from Harvard University (1995-1999). Early in his career, he spent over a decade in digital advertising and ad-tech, holding progressive roles at Atlas (later Atlas Publisher/aQuantive) from 2000 to 2007, including Manager of Strategy and Product Planning, Director of Product Management and Analytics, and Vice President and General Manager. When Microsoft acquired aQuantive, Easterly transitioned to Microsoft, where he served as General Manager of Advertising Networks and later General Manager of Advertising Strategy and Monetization, overseeing a billion-dollar division within Microsoft's online advertising business from 2007 to 2011.

In 2011, Easterly became an Entrepreneur in Residence at Madrona Venture Group, the prominent Seattle-based venture capital firm, where he incubated the idea that would become Rover. Co-founding the company in September 2011 as CEO, he grew it from a Seattle hackathon concept into the dominant pet-care marketplace, serving over 6.2 million unique pet-owning households. Under his leadership, Rover merged with competitor DogVacay in 2017, consolidating the pet-sitting market, and went public via a SPAC merger in August 2021, listing on Nasdaq under the ticker ROVR. In November 2023, Rover agreed to be acquired by Blackstone in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $2.3 billion, completed in February 2024. Easterly was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in the Pacific Northwest in 2016.

In June 2025, Easterly transitioned from CEO to Executive Chair of the Board, handing day-to-day leadership to Brent Turner. In addition to his operational role at Rover, Easterly is an angel investor who has backed early-stage startups, most notably Mighty AI, a Seattle-based training data and computer vision company that was later acquired by Uber in 2019.

Aaron Easterly invests as an angel at the seed stage, drawing on his deep experience in marketplace businesses, digital advertising, and consumer technology. His investment in Mighty AI -- a company focused on AI training data for computer vision and autonomous vehicles -- suggests an interest in data-driven and AI-enabled platforms, particularly those operating in the Seattle tech ecosystem. His entrepreneurial background at Rover, a two-sided marketplace connecting pet owners with care providers, gives him strong pattern recognition for marketplace dynamics, network effects, and consumer internet businesses. He is likely drawn to founders building category-defining platforms with strong unit economics and defensible network effects.