Dj Patil

Dhanurjay "DJ" Patil (born August 3, 1974) is an entrepreneur, investor, scientist, and public-policy leader whose career spans industry, academia, and government. He earned a B.A. in Mathematics from the University of California, San Diego and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Maryland, College Park, where he later served on the faculty studying nonlinear dynamics and chaos theory. Early in his career he was an AAAS Science & Technology Policy Fellow working on threat-anticipation research for the U.S. Department of Defense. He is the son of Suhas Patil, the venture capitalist and founder of Cirrus Logic.

Patil is best known for helping to popularize the field of data science: while Head of Data Products and Chief Scientist at LinkedIn (where he was also Chief Security Officer), he is widely credited with co-coining the term "data scientist." He also held product and technology roles at RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce), Color Labs (as Chief Product Officer), and earlier at Skype, PayPal, and eBay, and served as data-scientist-in-residence at Greylock Partners (circa 2011–2012), where he co-authored two O'Reilly books on building data teams and products.

In 2015 President Obama appointed Patil the first-ever U.S. Chief Data Scientist within the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, a role he held until 2017. There he launched the Precision Medicine Initiative, drove police-data transparency and criminal-justice-reform efforts, and helped seed roughly 40 Chief Data Officer roles across the federal government. His government work is chronicled in Michael Lewis's books *The Fifth Risk* and *The Premonition*.

Since leaving government, Patil has been a founding-team member and Head of Technology/CTO at Devoted Health, joined Venrock as an adviser (2017) focused on healthcare, security, and data, and became a General Partner at GreatPoint Ventures (2023), where he backs companies in healthcare, enterprise technologies, and national security. He is also an active angel investor and a board member at Crisis Text Line.

• Invests where data, AI/ML, and security intersect — data/AI infrastructure, developer tools, enterprise software, healthcare, and national security.
• On his Venrock focus: *"My primary focus is building new models to improve healthcare... I'll be helping as they think through how security, data science/ML/AI, etc. combine to make new models for improved health outcomes."*
• Gravitates to deeply technical founders building production-grade data and ML systems; his own portfolio skews toward data platforms (graph, vector search, streaming, observability).
• Operates across the spectrum: personal angel checks at seed/early stage plus larger institutional rounds through GreatPoint Ventures.
• Public-mission lens — a track record (Precision Medicine, criminal-justice data, Crisis Text Line, Rebellion Defense) shows appetite for companies tackling large societal and government-scale problems.