| Website | geniusgroupcos.com |
| University of Pennsylvania, Bachelor's | 1984 |
| Economics |
Drake Pruitt is CEO of Lionsolver, Inc., a company pioneering machine learning applications for the enterprise. He is also the founder of the Genius:Group, a Los Angeles venture-studio seeding, growing and remediating technology and digital media businesses.
Prior to Genius:Group, Pruitt served as SVP Global Business Development for Ascent Media, a $500mm public spinoff from Liberty Media. At Ascent, Pruitt and his team were responsible for new product and services development, focused on emerging digital platform, strategic customer facility takeovers, and go to market partner development. Ascent Media was sold to Deluxe and Encompass Media in January of 2011.
Before joining Ascent, Pruitt founded DisruptiveWorks , a consulting services firm building audiences for mobile applications, casual game companies, and rich media content providers across all connected consoles. Pruitt served as interim EVP of Marketing and Business Development for Exponential Entertainment, a pioneer in casual, entertainment-based games on the web.
Previously, he served as CEO of Bocada, Inc., a venture-backed application software company providing storage intelligence to Fortune 500 corporations and managed outsourcers, including IBM Global Services. Bocada raised $21.5mm through three successive rounds of financing, and scaled the business in excess of 400 enterprise customers globally.
Prior to Bocada, Drake served as Vice President of Sales for Aquantive Inc., a pioneer in targeted online advertising and serving. Aquantive was purchased by Microsoft for $6 billion in 2007.
Before Aquantive, Pruitt was general manager and a member of the founding market launch team for Nextel Inc, where he built the direct and indirect sales organization and grew the business to in excess of $50mm in 4 years. Nextel went public and later merged with Sprint Corporation.
Pruitt began his career on Wall Street, working in investment banking for Lehman Brothers, and for Montgomery Securities in sales and trading.
Pruitt graduated with a BA in Economics cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he rowed on the crew team and was a member of The St Elmo Club of Philadelphia.
Pruitt serves as board observer and advisor to YourSports, Graphic.ly, RepublicProject, Exponential Entertainment, Venture 51, Sparkwords, and Ohloh (acquired by Sourceforge).
Pruitt is also a full member of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, the National Association of Corporate Directors, and Social Venture Partners.
