Charley Polachi

Charley Polachi is a Boston-area executive-search entrepreneur and angel investor best known as a co-founder and partner at Polachi, an Access Executive Search firm serving technology, venture capital, and private equity clients. Hunt Scanlon describes him as having placed hundreds of C-level executives in the technology sector over more than 30 years.

Before Polachi, he co-founded Fenwick Partners, a search firm focused on early-stage technology companies; Fenwick was acquired by Heidrick & Struggles in 1998. After the acquisition, Polachi became Office Managing Partner for Heidrick & Struggles’ Route 128 office and served on the North American Management Committee. He stepped down from that role in 2001 and co-founded Polachi in 2002 with Peter Polachi and Susan Mills.

Polachi also co-founded International Technology Partners in 1993 and Access Search Partners in 2007, both networks focused on technology executive search. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Biology from the College of the Holy Cross and an MBA with honors from Boston College.

His public investment profile is sparse, but Foundersuite identifies him as an angel/HNW investor with a seed-stage focus. His operating edge appears to come from long-running access to founders, CEOs, board members, VC firms, and PE firms through executive search rather than from an institutional fund platform.

• Invests as an angel at the seed stage; no public institutional fund mandate or fixed check size was found.
• Public investor databases list focus areas including SaaS, project management, real estate technology, TMT, industrials, and broader technology.
• His professional network is concentrated in technology companies and VC/PE ecosystems; Polachi’s practice includes CEO, board, and partner searches for public and private technology companies and investment firms.
• He appears most relevant for founders who can benefit from executive hiring, board-building, go-to-market leadership, and investor-network access.
• In founder/operator advice, he emphasizes clear leadership needs and honesty about company challenges; in Entrepreneur, he advised companies to be straightforward with recruiters so they can find people able to handle real constraints.