Bobby Yazdani

Babak "Bobby" Yazdani (born 1963 in Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian-American entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist. He moved to England for secondary school and later emigrated to the United States at age 19. He earned a B.A. in Applied Mathematics from the University of California, Berkeley. From 1988 to 1997, he held various senior management and R&D positions at Oracle Corporation, building deep expertise in enterprise software.

In 1997, Yazdani founded Saba Software, a pioneering provider of Human Capital Management (HCM) software specializing in Learning Management and Talent Management solutions. He took Saba public in 2000. At its peak, the platform served over 30 million users from 2,200 customers across 195 countries in 37 languages. Yazdani stepped down as CEO in 2013 when Saba was acquired by Vector Capital; Cornerstone OnDemand later acquired Saba in February 2020 for $1.3 billion.

Following his entrepreneurial success, Yazdani founded Signatures Capital, his family office, in 2006, and co-founded Cota Capital in 2014 (officially launched 2015), an SEC-registered investment firm with over $1 billion in assets under management. In 2014, CB Insights ranked him the #1 angel investor out of 2,000 for successful follow-on funding. He serves on the board of trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (now SLMath) and is a supporter of the Maryam Mirzakhani Endowed Professorship. He also underwrote the Signatures Innovation Fellowship at UC Berkeley (2015-2019), supporting data science projects with commercial promise.

Yazdani and Cota Capital take a thematic, stage-agnostic, and operationally engaged investment approach, focusing exclusively on U.S.-based enterprise technology companies. The firm concentrates on identifying "Net New" enterprise technology challenges and deploys capital flexibly across innovation and liquidity cycles. Core investment themes include Modern Infrastructure, Enterprise Automation, FinTech, and HealthTech.

Yazdani believes AI represents the beginning of a new technology-driven supercycle but takes a measured stance on generative AI, noting that "generative AI isn't reliable (yet)" for mass enterprise adoption. Rather than chasing consumer-facing AI hype, Cota Capital focuses on foundational infrastructure -- particularly data center energy efficiency, next-generation cooling technologies, and the computational infrastructure required to support AI workloads. As Yazdani has observed: "Within four blocks of my office, $150 billion has been raised to invest in AI this year," underscoring his belief that the best opportunities lie in the infrastructure layer rather than application-level AI.

The firm also invests in vertical operating platforms that integrate deep domain expertise with advanced technology to enhance operational efficiency across industries including restaurants, wealth management, insurance, and healthcare.