Darr Aley

Darr Aley is a serial technology operator and investor whose career spans roughly three decades of building, buying, and selling companies. He began in enterprise consulting at Accenture before being recruited into Amazon in the early 2000s, where he helped build the company's e-Commerce ASP Services business into a roughly $700M unit (2001–2005) and later ran corporate development and M&A — leading negotiations on several of the earliest acquisitions that expanded Amazon's global retail and technology footprint. He has described working alongside Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Owen Van Natta on M&A, business development, strategy, and operations. Across his career he has held executive or investor roles tied to a string of exits, including Shiva (sold to Intel), Avatar (sold to DCA), Ziff-Davis Publishing (SoftBank), Zip2 (Compaq), WhoWhere (Lycos), and Epylon (Accenture).

For the past ~20 years Aley has concentrated on B2B and B2C data-analytics companies, frequently partnering with his brother, Tom Aley. Together they co-founded and sold the data-analytics company Generate (acquired by News Corp in 2008) and invested in NetProspex (acquired by Dun & Bradstreet in 2015). He is the founder and managing partner of Position A Partners, a specialized investment, product-innovation, and corporate-development firm founded in 2015 and based in Ross, California, that works with disruptive technology companies in AI, IoT, robotics, autonomous/electric vehicles, transportation, supply chain, and cyber. In 2017 Position A announced a partnership with BootstrapLabs focused on AI and cybersecurity challenges.

Most recently, Aley is Co-Founder and Chief Marketing/Commercial Officer of Aidentified, an AI-powered, relationship-based prospecting platform (drawing on 200M+ consumer and 100M+ professional U.S. profiles) that reached the Inc. 5000 list. He was named an EY Entrepreneur Of The Year 2024 New England Award finalist for that company (headquartered in Concord, MA). He has also co-founded the Backyards Foundation (backyards.ai) with Jens Hoj — a 501(c)(3) non-profit with a "100-year vision" that identifies, funds, and helps scale AI-powered solutions for underserved communities. His prior affiliations include a strategic-advisor role at Story Ventures and an advisory role at CYTK Corp.

• Backs disruptive, deep-tech companies — AI/ML, IoT, robotics, autonomous and electric vehicles, transportation, global supply chain, and cybersecurity — via Position A Partners.
• Particularly drawn to B2B and B2C data-analytics businesses, the segment where he has spent ~20 years operating and where his own exits (Generate, NetProspex, Aidentified) sit.
• Invests as an operator-investor "from napkin to IPO," combining capital with hands-on product-innovation and corporate-development help rather than passive checks.
• In his own words, he has "started, invested, and/or joined companies in every stage of development … and seen them through to billions of dollars in exit value" — signaling a bias toward founders building toward large strategic outcomes.
• Through the Backyards Foundation, he also directs philanthropic/impact funding into AI-powered solutions for underserved communities, indicating an interest in AI applied to generational, real-world impact.