Jared Jonas

Jared Jonas is a technology founder, product executive, inventor, and angel investor. He is best known as co-founder of Bend Labs, a flexible sensor company founded in 2013 that developed soft silicone sensors for measuring bend, stretch, force, and human motion. Nitto Denko acquired Bend Labs on June 1, 2022, and the business began operating as Nitto Bend Technologies, Inc.; Nitto’s release named Jared Jonas and Colton Ottley as Bend’s co-CEOs.

At Bend Labs, Jonas has worked on soft sensor systems for applications including AR/VR gloves, remote healthcare, digital health monitoring, automotive automation, sports, robotics, and industrial sensing. Nitto describes Bend’s flexible sensor as able to measure “bend,” “stretch,” and “force” with high accuracy, flexibility, and durability. Bend/Nitto product materials describe flexible angular displacement sensors for rehabilitation, sports/training, infrastructure monitoring, automotive deformation detection, industrial robot monitoring, and VR finger-motion detection.

Before Bend Labs, Jonas worked as a partner at a small technology fund, where he made investments including Instacart and inDinero. He also worked as Technical SEO & Technology Manager at Goldberg Jones, in neuroscience research at UW Medicine, at WebNav Inc. on product strategy and UI for visual search, in Western Washington University’s Computer Science Department, and as a web and multimedia developer.

Jonas studied Cellular Biology at Western Washington University from 2000 to 2005. His LinkedIn profile also lists continuing education at the University of Washington from 2005 to 2008 in genomics, proteomics, MIS, business, and entrepreneurship, including participation with WebNav in the 2007 UW Business Plan Competition, where the team placed in the top 15 and moved to the investment round.

• Jonas appears to invest as an angel/operator rather than through a currently branded fund. Public investor databases list him as an Angel/Individual investor in Seattle.
• His publicly listed markets are Health Care, Wearables, Enterprise Software, Mobile, Clean Technology, Consumer Internet, and Hardware.
• His own operating background suggests a bias toward technical products where hardware, software, sensors, and data meet. Bend Labs described its platform as “low power sensors + algorithms + software” for smart garments, VR gloves, and remote medical devices.
• He is likely most relevant for founders building technically defensible products in wearables, healthcare devices, sensing, robotics, AR/VR, IoT, or applied enterprise software.
• No reliable public source was found for his standard check size or whether he is actively making new investments.