Auren Hoffman

Auren Hoffman is an entrepreneur and angel investor. He is the founder of companies Rapleaf, LiveRamp, Dialog, SafeGraph, and Flex Capital. Hoffman is an investor in over 120 companies, primarily those in the technology field.

Since he was a child, Hoffman has had an entrepreneurial spirit. He began selling baseball cards at a local show when he was in the seventh grade, which was a lucrative experience; he once made $1,000 in one show. Hoffman attended Mamaroneck High School in Mamaroneck, New York and University of California, Berkeley where he graduated in 1996 with a BSE in industrial engineering and operations research.

Hoffman founded––and sold––three companies before the age of thirty: BridgePath, an enterprise software provider for staffing firms; Kyber Systems, an intranet development firm; and GetRelevant, an internet lead generation network. Kyber Systems was sold in 1997, while BridgePath and GetRelevant were sold in 2002.

Dialog, also called Dialog Retreat, was founded by Hoffman and Peter Thiel in 2006. Dialog is an invitation-only community made up of industry leaders who gather to share new and "nonobvious" ideas off the record.

Rapleaf was a company that tracked user activity across websites like eBay and similar internet marketplaces and created user profiles for the purpose of establishing an online reputation. It was founded by Hoffman and Manish Shah in May 2006. In 2007, the site shifted to a people search engine that built aggregate profiles of people's personal information, using their email addresses to track their online activities and website profiles. Rapleaf was later acquired by TowerData, a company that sold data tied to email addresses.

LiveRamp was founded in 2011 as a division of Rapleaf. LiveRamp provides a data connectivity platform to businesses; it tracks customer data across websites and devices and integrates it into a business's online marketing platform for personalized marketing purposes. LiveRamp uses LiveRamp Connect or SSH File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) to collect offline customer data, then anonymizes and matches it to a RampID (formerly IdentityLink) profile, LiveRamp's anonymous tracking and identification tool. The RampID is then matched to cookies and mobile IDs, which translates the offline data to online, and sent to one of LiveRamp's data destinations. Hoffman, who previously served as LiveRamp's CEO, cofounded LiveRamp with Dayo Esho, Jeremy Lizt, Manish Shah, and Vivek Sodera.

Hoffman is the founder and CEO of SafeGraph, a company that collects location data and sells it to data scientists. SafeGraph's customers, which include Sysco, Choice Hotels, and Ares Management, use the data for purposes such as geographic mapping, local search, and financial services. Types of data collected and provided to customers include not just location information, but spatial hierarchy metadata and place traffic data as well. SafeGraph collects information on over 6 million physical locations in the United States and Canada through the use of mobile device data, satellites, and other sources. SafeGraph was founded in 2016.

Hoffman is the host of World of DaaS, a SafeGraph podcast about all things related to data.

Hoffman is a founder of investment firm Flex Capital, which has invested in companies like Chime, BrightRoll, Juniper Square, Airbyte, and Flexport. Flex Capital participates in seed to series C funding rounds. It was founded in January 2018.

TitleDock is a software that manages contact data across devices and platforms. Hoffman founded TitleDock in October 2021.

Hoffman is an angel investor; he has invested in more than one hundred companies, mostly those in the technology field. His investments have included Crunchbase, PeerWell, Broadly, Scopely, JumpCloud, Carta, Data Mechanics, Datavant, Meebo, TravelJoy, Hackpad, Clearbit, Gigster, and Marqeta.

Hoffman was awarded the 2015 Data Innovator of the Year Award by Data Innovators Group (DIG) in association with the Direct Marketing Club of New York. The award honors those who have made significant contributions to the effectiveness of data-driven marketing.