Bobby Yazdani

Bobby Yazdani is founder and partner of Cota Capital, an investment firm focused on private and public technology companies. Through his family office Signatures Capital and Cota Capital, Yazdani has invested in over 150 private companies. Yazdani's first investment was Masimo Corporation in 1989, where he also developed software to improve the accuracy of the company’s early neonatal pulse oximeters. Over the course of his career Yazdani has invested in more than 200 companies.

Yazdani was born in Tehrarn, Iran but completed his initial education in England and received a B.A. in Applied Mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2014, Yazdani was ranked number one out of 2000 angel investors for successful follow-on funding by CB Insights, and in 2015, Yazdani helped launch the Signatures Innovation Fellows program at the University of California (UC), Berkeley to support commercially-viable data science projects. In addition, Yazdani served on the President’s Leadership Council at the University of Southern California (USC).

Bobby founded Saba Software in 1997, taking the company public in 2000. Saba was a platform for workforce management and e-learning solutions that provided products for staff learning, performance, and talent management. The company served over 30 million people from 2,200 customers across 195 countries and in 37 languages worldwide. Prior to Saba, Yazdani worked in various research and development roles at Oracle Corporation.

Established in 2015, Cota Capital is an SEC-registered investment company with $1 billion in assets under management that focuses its investments in the areas of modern infrastructure, enterprise automation, financial technology, and healthcare technology.

Yazdani has made the following endowments:

• The American Legacy Fund in partnership with U.S. Soccer.
• The Berkeley Changemaker Endowment and the Signatures Innovation Fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley.
• The Maryam Mirzakhani Endowed Professorship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute.
• The Yazdani Family Endowed Scholarship, the Parivash Yazdani Research Fund, and the Maker Space at the University of Southern California.