Mr. Ohana has been investing in, advising, and operating technology and communications companies in the U.S., Europe, Israel and Asia, since the early 1990's.
From 1987 to 1993, Mr. Ohana was a merger and acquisitions attorney at Fried Frank Harris Shriver & Jacobson.
In 1994, Mr. Ohana launched New Media Capital (NMC), an Internet merchant bank. NMC secured the funding for and served on the boards of Snickelways Interactive (New York's leading e-commerce developer), CyberSites (a pioneering social network for fans of Ancient History which developed many of the features now prevalent in social networks) and MetaMatrix (among the first enterprise information integration companies); invested in LookSmart (NASD: LOOK) pre-IPO; and led the acquisition and financing of NewsAlert (later renamed Inlumen, see below). NMC's advisory clients included Lagardere, N2K (the leading online music retailer), Newsweek Interactive and the Estate of Leonard Bernstein.
From 1999 to 2002, Mr. Ohana was also the CEO of Inlumen (a news search and alerting engine and provider of private label web-based financial portals). Mr. Ohana acquired the company by forming a $25 million buyout fund with financial investors Milstein Brothers Capital Partners, The Pivotal Group and RAF Netventures and international publishers Mondadori (Italy), Hollinger (UK/Canada) and John Fairfax Holdings (Australia). Mr. Ohana raised a follow-on $35 million equity round in 2000, led by Capital Z Partners. In 2002, the company was sold to ScreamingMedia (NASD: PCOR).
In 2004, Mr. Ohana launched Parkview as a Digital Economy Merchant Bank and completed transactions and/or investments involving Urban Data Solutions (a developer of 3D models of US cities), Cogito (a developer of analytics software), Network-1 Security Solutions (NASD:NSSI) (a patent enforcement company), LatinWest/LocalTel (a publisher of neighborhood Yellow Pages), Quadriserv (a securities lending marketplace) and EarthData International (an aerial sensing and digital mapping company). Mr. Ohana also helped engineer the spin-off of Cellfish Media (a mobile content publisher) from Lagardere S.A (listed on the Paris stock exchange) to the Caisse de Depots et Placements du Quebec in which CDPQ and others invested $60 million in 2006.
Mr. Ohana holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of California at Berkeley and a J.D. from New York University School of Law.
