David Roman

David Roman is a Managing Director and one of the co-founders of Lotus Innovations Fund, a private equity firm launched in 2013–2014 by a group of operators — including Christian Mack and Philip Jones — who had personally built and exited enterprise software companies. Their shared observation was that companies beyond the startup stage (with customers and a small pipeline but limited infrastructure) were unattractive to most venture capitalists, while traditional PE firms supplied capital without the operating support these businesses needed. That gap became the basis for the firm's "Lotus Methodology" of acquiring, transforming, and exiting small-to-mid-size technology companies serving large enterprise customers in enterprise IT and telecom.

Roman brings more than 20 years of enterprise software business development and sales experience spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. Before Lotus Innovations Fund II, he was part of the leadership team responsible for transforming Resolve Systems, LLC from a professional-services business into an enterprise software company — work that involved major strategic customers and partners such as JP Morgan Chase, T-Mobile, and Intelsat. Earlier, he founded a strategic business-development firm called Ex Novo, which worked with Fortune 500 companies including Expedia, Zappos, AT&T, T-Mobile, and JP Morgan.

Roman's current roles extend across the Lotus platform and its portfolio: he is Managing Partner of Lotus Innovations Fund II GP LLC and Lotus Domaine III LP, and has served as a director/independent director of Edge Technologies / Edge Total Intelligence (edgeTI), a Lotus-controlled enterprise software company. Educationally, he holds a B.A. in Clinical Sciences and an M.S. in Physical Therapy from Ithaca College — an unusual background for a PE operator that predates his two-decade pivot into enterprise technology.

• Buy, transform, exit — not minority seed bets. Lotus acquires control of "high-potential, small to mid-size technology companies that serve large enterprise customers in enterprise IT and telecom," then applies its operating playbook and exits.
• Targets the "post-startup orphan." The founders explicitly built Lotus to serve companies that "were beyond the start-up stage; having landed customers and built a small pipeline" — too mature for most VCs, but under-served by generic PE.
• Operating support over pure capital. The thesis critique of traditional PE: firms "offered the needed capital, but not the resources or support to help them build a functional infrastructure." Lotus's answer is the proprietary "Lotus Methodology," pairing experienced managers with shared services across portfolio companies.
• Enterprise IT / telecom software specialization. Focus areas cluster around systems and information management, IT operations, and business/productivity software (e.g., IBM Tivoli/Netcool/Maximo-adjacent management software via Resolve Systems).
• What makes them say yes: a company with real enterprise customers and pipeline but constrained infrastructure, where Lotus's operators can drive a services-to-software transformation and a path to exit.