Josh Kopelman

Joshua Kopelman is an American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and philanthropist.

Kopelman is best known as the founder of Half.com, a fixed price marketplace connecting buyers and sellers of used books, movies and music products. In 2000, Kopelman sold Half.com to EBay.

Kopelman was born in Great Neck, New York, the son of Carol and Dr. Richard Kopelman. His father was a professor at Baruch College and his mother a real estate broker. He attended the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

In 1992, during his sophomore year, Kopelman co-founded Infonautics Corporation, in Wayne, Pennsylvania. In 1996, Infonautics went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange. Kopelman left Infonautics in 1999 to found Half.com.

After selling Half.com to eBay, Kopelman remained with eBay for three years. In 2004, Josh co-founded TurnTide an anti-spam technology company that was acquired by Symantec.

Josh is an inventor on sixteen U.S. Patents for his work in Internet technology. Josh was ranked 4th on Forbes 2015 Midas List of the top 100 tech investors —and has been named as one of the top ten ‘angel investors’ in the United States by Newsweek magazine, one of "Tech's New Kingmakers" by Business 2.0 magazine and a "Rising VC Star" by Fortune magazine. Josh also is the proud winner of a second place ribbon in the 2011 Nantucket Watermelon Eating competition.

Kopelman is currently Managing Director of First Round Capital, a seed-stage venture fund. He is an investor, director and advisor to a variety of businesses, most in the software and Internet domain, including OnDeck Capital, Flatiron Health, Aster Data Systems, Knewton, Gigya, IronPort, Mint.com, Monetate, LinkedIn, ModCloth, AppNexus, BankSimple, Swipely, Wanelo, OpenX, LiveOps, Clover Health and Discourse.

In 2007, Kopelman helped to coin the phrase the Implicit Web to better describe the Semantic Web.

In 1995, Josh married Rena Cohen, an attorney. In 2001, Josh and his wife created the Kopelman Foundation, a non-profit philanthropic organization to provide “start-up” grants to social entrepreneurs. In 2002, the Kopelman Foundation funded a project to digitize and host the complete text of the Jewish Encyclopedia online.

Kopelman currently lives in a suburb of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with his wife and two children.