David Gerster
Investment Partner
David Gerster is an Investment Partner at Fusion Fund, an early-stage venture fund based in Palo Alto. Prior to Fusion, he was an investor at the JLL Spark Global Venture Fund, a $100M early stage proptech fund. At JLL, he led the fund’s efforts to invest in the Series A of OpenSpace, which later raised a Series D at a valuation of more than $900M. He has also invested as an angel, most notably in the first rounds of Cloudera and Alation.
Prior to JLL, he was the Vice President of Data Science at BigML, where he promoted the idea that data science is easy by speaking at conferences and teaching workshops. During his time at BigML, he gave talks at CERN, the Predict Conference, ML Prague, Big Data Spain, Papis.io, DataLead (UC Berkeley), DataBeat (VentureBeat), and more than a dozen other venues.
At Groupon, he built an elite data science team that trained the first machine-learned models for mobile deal relevance. At Yahoo, he led the project to collect billions of URL clickstreams in Hadoop and use them to improve Yahoo’s main web search algorithm. He holds an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley and a Bachelor’s degree from Harvard University.