Gary Offner

Gary Offner is Senior Vice President and Head of Nasdaq Ventures, Nasdaq's principal strategic and technology venture-investment arm. He directs a global corporate venture fund, targeting roughly $1M–$10M allocations across Series A through Series C rounds and overseeing a portfolio of more than 20 companies. In this role he also informs Nasdaq's broader corporate-strategy development with first-hand intelligence on fintech and venture-market developments, and has led several transactions across Nasdaq business units — including serving as Chairman of Nasdaq Private Market following a consortium partnership with four of the largest global financial institutions.

Offner brings over thirty years of direct private-capital investment experience through multiple market cycles, concentrated in early- and mid-stage companies. Before Nasdaq he was a Managing Director at Morgan Stanley, where for over a decade he managed Principal Strategic Investments globally on behalf of the Institutional Equity Division. Earlier, he spent eight years in venture capital at SCP Private Equity Partners — an $850M venture fund sponsored by Safeguard Scientifics — where, as Senior Vice President, he led investments in a range of information-technology companies.

He was educated at Columbia University: he earned a BA in Economics, magna cum laude, from Columbia College in 1990 (elected to Phi Beta Kappa) and an MBA from Columbia Business School in 1996 (elected to Beta Gamma Sigma). His profile has also been associated with work touching Nasdaq Private Market, Fnality International, and XM Cyber through Nasdaq Ventures' portfolio and partnership activity.

• Invests strategically on behalf of Nasdaq — deals are meant to combine financial return with commercial partnership and insight into Nasdaq's core markets, not pure financial VC.
• Stage: primarily Series A–C; check size roughly $1M–$10M per company.
• Sectors: fintech and capital-markets technology, market infrastructure, data/analytics & workflow tools, AI/ML, anti-financial-crime and RegTech, digital assets, ESG, and emerging asset classes.
• Nasdaq Ventures' stated mission is "discovering, investing in and partnering with unique fintech companies worldwide" whose technology aligns with Nasdaq's objectives in global capital markets.
• On his current focus (private markets): *"Private markets are experiencing a generational shift and real-time, data-driven insights are becoming essential to how firms raise and deploy capital."*
• Says yes to companies that can enhance market infrastructure, improve trading efficiency, streamline regulatory compliance, or deliver cutting-edge data insights — where a Nasdaq partnership can accelerate the startup and vice versa.