speaker-photo

DAYAKAR PUSKOOR

DALLAS VENTURE CAPITAL
Founder and Managing Director
Dayakar Puskoor, Founder and Managing Director of Dallas Venture Capital (DVC), is a serial entrepreneur turned visionary investor, who had the foresight to launch one of the first tech-focused venture funds. Headquartered in post-telecom Dallas, the fund invested in several pioneering early stage startups in cloud, AI/ML and mobile technologies in Dallas, Silicon Valley, Seattle and India. He is also the author of Ace the Pitch, an Amazon best-seller in the business category. Passionate about mentoring founding teams of startups, Dayakar operates with a philosophy to Invest, Engage, Collaborate, Grow & Exit. The spirit of this philosophy has resulted in several path breaking transformations and winning exits for startups. His mantra of “Entrepreneur investing in other Entrepreneurs”, has led to the creation of a like-minded ecosystem of Investors, Advisors and Startups for mutual success. Besides playing a key role in Dallas Venture Capital, Dayakar is also Executive Chairman at Motivity Labs, GlobalOutlook and KeepTrax, Board Member at CoreStack, FelixHealthCare, Kore.ai, Altia Systems, SnapOne, and Viviota, Board Observer at Minetta Brook and an Advisory Board Member at Boxfish and Glympse. Dayakar began his career with Motorola where he owned the P&L for the Paging product and received the Engineering Excellence Award from management at Nippon Motorola. Following which, as Founder and CEO of JP Mobile, he pioneered the industry’s first mobile software solutions company considered to be inventor of wireless email for the Palm PDA platform. He secured $55 million in financing and successfully completed its acquisition by Good Technology, later acquired by Motorola. Prior to founding Dallas Venture Capital, Dayakar owned the P&L for the Hosting & Mobility Solutions business at Microsoft. He was responsible for the incubation, development & management of new mobility and cloud solutions. He also led the $350M hosting business encompassing all product development, product management, marketing, and business development.

Speaking At

1:30 PM - 2:30 PM - 3rd Floor Room 5

MARCH 30, 2026 - Day 1

Convergence Labs - Trends in AI: Startup Ecosystem

This session will explore how evolving AI trends are reshaping the startup ecosystem, with a focus on how AI-first companies are driving unprecedented valuation growth and investor interest. It will also examine what’s ahead for AI innovation, funding patterns, and the factors that will define the next generation of high-growth startups.