Prosper Nwankpa

Prosper Nwankpa is a Nigerian-born technology entrepreneur, software architect, and Silicon Valley angel investor. He migrated to the United States on a student visa and studied computer science on a full academic scholarship at Williams College, graduating in the class of 2004. His path from a full-scholarship student to a repeat Bay Area founder is a recurring theme in how he is profiled.

His first company was Peanut Labs, which he co-founded with fellow Williams alum Murti Hussain. Peanut Labs began as a maker of embeddable surveys for social platforms like Facebook and grew into a cloud-based paid-survey and consumer-insights business that harnessed large data sets from hundreds of millions of people, reportedly serving a large share of the Fortune 500. The company raised roughly $3.2M and was ultimately acqui-hired.

He then co-founded Avanoo, Inc., where he served as President, Chief Technology Officer, and Co-Founder (roughly 2013–2020). Avanoo was an enterprise learning-and-development platform combining assessments, three-minute "micro-learning" video stories, and predictive analytics to help employees adopt new behaviors, mindsets, and habits and to improve workplace culture and performance. Avanoo raised approximately $7.8M (investors included Newfund Capital) before winding down.

Since leaving Avanoo, Nwankpa has worked as a Senior Software Engineering Leader at Google. Alongside his operating roles, he has been an active early-stage angel investor in the San Francisco startup ecosystem.

• Invests primarily at pre-seed and seed stage in technology startups, frequently as part of a syndicate alongside institutional seed funds and accelerators.
• Sector interests reported across investor databases center on enterprise applications/SaaS, retail & consumer, and data/developer tooling — areas that mirror his own operating experience at Peanut Labs (consumer data/insights) and Avanoo (enterprise learning software).
• Brings an operator/technical lens as a repeat founder, CTO, and current engineering leader — likely values strong technical execution and product depth.
• Aggregator profiles describe a "network-oriented approach," emphasizing relationships and warm collaboration with founders and co-investors rather than purely transactional deal-making.
• Note: a detailed, first-person public investment thesis was not found in primary sources; the above is drawn from investor-database profiles and his operating history.