Former Adobe CEO, Chizen, joins Voyager Capital

September 18, 2009 | Camille Ricketts | Comments | |

Voyager Capital has brought Bruce Chizen, former chief executive officer of Adobe Systems, on board as a venture partner. A long-time member of the Menlo Park, Calif. firm’s advisory board, he will be focusing his efforts on digital media and software opportunities.

Chizen is a prestigious figure in Silicon Valley, having turned Adobe from just another software company into the choice for default design and drafting software it is today. During his tenure, he tripled the company’s revenue, opened up a new enterprise market, and ventured into open source offerings. He will no doubt bring valuable contacts to Voyager, which invests almost exclusively in digital media, software and wireless companies located on the West Coast. It has offices located in the Bay Area, Portland, Ore. and Seattle.

Voyager currently supports 32 portfolio companies, including location-based advertising firm PlaceCast, data analytics provider Ground Truth, web video advertising creator Keystream, web annotation service Trailfire, and travel booking site Yapta. Chizen says he will join the board of several existing portfolio to get his feet wet before launching investments of his own.

Voyager enjoyed a number of lucrative exits in 1999 before the dot-com bubble burst. It’s tapered off in recent years, with no exits following last fall’s economic downturn. Earlier in 2008, document review and management software company Attenex was sold to FTI Consulting for $88 million, and loan processing provider CapitalStream was sold to HCL Technologies.

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About the Author, Camille Ricketts

Camille is the lead writer for GreenBeat. She came to VentureBeat from Google where she worked on its traditional platforms team, particularly in TV. Before that, she was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal in New York and London. Follow her on Twitter at @camillericketts, and follow VentureBeat on Twitter at @venturebeat.

With GreenBeat 2009, VentureBeat's all-star conference on all things Smart Grid, coming up in November, Camille will be expanding coverage of this exciting space. Stay up to date by following @greenbeat2009 on Twitter or by becoming a fan of the event on Facebook here.

  • stevedc3
    'prestigious figure' make no sense - i think you meant prodigious?