Martin Varsavsky

Entrepreneur

Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Prelude, Martin Varsavsky is a Spanish entrepreneur who has founded seven companies in the USA and Europe in the past 25 years, all of which are based on new technologies that he identified in their infancy and helped grow.

Varsavsky has applied this same approach in creating Prelude, a comprehensive fertility company with a focus on providing progressive fertility care to preserve people’s ability to have healthy babies when they’re ready. The company was established to educate and inform men and women about their fertility in their early 20s, follow them through their 30s and 40s, and to offer the latest advances in reproductive science and technology through The Prelude Method.

Varsavsky started his career in the late 1980s when he founded Medicorp Sciences with Argentinian scientist Claudio Cuello, Nobel Prize winner César Milstein, and Dr. Phil Gold, working in the field of monoclonal antibodies applied to AIDS testing. In the 1990s, he built Viatel, which became the first pan-European fiber optic network, followed by Jazztel, which did in Spain what Viatel did throughout Europe. When Varsavsky exited Viatel the company was worth $1.2B and when he exited Jazztel it was worth $770M.

In the early 2000s he built Ya.com, the second largest Spanish-language internet portal with an investment of $28M, which was sold to Deutsche Telekom a few years later for $650M. Subsequently, Varsavsky built one of the first European cloud computing companies, Einsteinet; co-founded Eolia, one of Spain's largest renewable energy companies; and started Fon, the world's largest WiFi network with over 20 million hotspots. Varsavsky is currently the largest shareholder and Chairman of Fon.

Varsavsky runs his own investment fund with investments including Tumblr, 23andMe (the genetic testing company, which sparked the initial idea for Prelude), and Aura Biosciences, whose new ocular melanoma treatment has been granted orphan drug designation by the FDA. Investors in Varsavsky’s ventures include Apax, Advent, Google, Index Ventures, Atomico, T Ventures, BT, Microsoft, and Qualcomm.

He also teaches entrepreneurship at Columbia Business School and runs the Varsavsky Foundation best known for its projects to improve education in Argentina and Chile, Educ.ar and Educ.ar Chile. In addition, he serves on the board of Germany's largest media company, Axel Springer.

Varsavsky received his B.A. from New York University, and holds a M.A. in International Affairs and a M.A. in Business Administration from Columbia University. He currently resides in Miami with his wife and seven children. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family, and has a passion for photography, cycling, piloting, and sailing.