Akbar Dawood

Akbar Dawood is a New York–based investor and repeat operator who currently serves as a Principal at Arc Ventures, a role he has held since 2022. He earned a BS in Economics (Markets & Management) from Duke University (class of 2005). He began his career in finance, working as an investment banker at Bank of America Merrill Lynch — where he ran an outsourced data team — and as a proprietary-desk trader at Credit Suisse, where he built quantitative trading models.

He then moved into building and commercializing technology companies. Dawood is a co-founder of Grafiti, Inc., a New York startup founded in 2017 that set out to build a search engine for charts, graphs, infographics, and data visualizations using OCR, computer vision, and machine learning (with a Slack integration and planned HubSpot/WordPress/Microsoft Teams integrations). He served as Grafiti's Chief Operating Officer from 2017 to 2021. Grafiti raised roughly $1.58M in pre-seed funding (led by FirstMark, with Tuesday Capital, Great Oaks Venture Capital, Alumni Ventures Group, and angels participating) and reported hundreds of thousands of users before winding down operations.

Beyond Grafiti, Dawood's operating résumé spans deep-tech commercialization: he co-founded a biotech startup that he helped take through FDA approval and to market, worked with the State of Maryland as an interim CEO/CFO commercializing university and federal-lab technology alongside professors and researchers, ran a startup seed fund for the EPA, helped launch/lead the Washington, DC NSF I-Corps node, and mentored teams through programs such as DCAccelerate. This blend of finance, founding, and tech-transfer experience shapes his investing lens toward technically hard, science-driven companies.

• Invests at pre-seed and seed (occasionally Series A) in "disruptive early-stage startups," per his own stated focus.
• Sector emphasis on deep tech, AI/ML, fintech, enterprise SaaS, biotech/pharma, medical devices, drug delivery, robotics, and energy/climate tech — areas where his commercialization and quant/finance background is directly relevant.
• Check sizes at Arc Ventures range $100K to $5.0M with a ~$1.5M sweet spot; personal angel checks tend to be smaller.
• Values founders solving genuinely hard technical or scientific problems — his track record commercializing lab and federal research and taking a biotech through FDA approval signals comfort with regulatory- and R&D-heavy paths that scare off generalist investors.
• Geographically anchored in New York City, with additional interest in Israel.