Mark Newhouse

Mark Newhouse is a General Partner at Innosphere Fund, an early-stage venture fund associated with Innosphere’s long-running technology incubator and commercialization platform. In 2017, he was named a General Partner of the fund; at the time, he said he joined because Innosphere was “really focused on company success” and had “a positive and substantive impact” on its companies.

Before investing, Newhouse spent much of his career at Corning, where he worked in telecommunications, consumer electronics, and cleantech markets. The National Center for Family Philanthropy says he helped deliver products and businesses generating more than $2.0 billion in revenue, co-invented LEAF fiber with Yanming Liu, founded and led a Corning optical-switching division, and completed his Corning tenure in Shanghai as a Senior Vice President of Corning Incorporated.

Since moving to Colorado, Newhouse has invested in and advised startups and served on boards including SWIR Vision Systems, Epic River, and Boulder AI. He is also active in impact investing and philanthropy: he co-founded the Left Behind Workers Fund, co-founded AidKit, founded the Social Venture Partners Impact Investing Group, and has served on boards including The Denver Foundation and Impact Charitable.

• Innosphere says it invests in “entrepreneurs that are building technology-that-matters in markets-that-matter.”
• The firm focuses on enterprise B2B SaaS software, Cleantech, and Medtech at Pre-seed, Seed, and Series A.
• Innosphere’s stated model is to “get involved early,” work with companies that may be “rough around the edges,” and help with practical company-building needs including hiring, product development, sales, marketing, customer success, UX, finance, and HR.
• The fund seeks companies with motivated founders that can achieve meaningful growth milestones with smaller amounts of capital and have a plausible path to corporate acquisition or PE buyout.
• Newhouse’s own comments on Boulder AI show a preference for differentiated products, experienced teams, customer validation, and large market opportunity: he cited the company’s product as “uniquely capable,” with “an experienced team” and “a rapidly growing opportunity.”
• In his philanthropic impact investing, Newhouse has emphasized measurable outcomes, saying the pay-for-success model lets donors give “only when impact is achieved.”