Ed Kania

Ed Kania is the managing partner of FarField Partners, a personal venture capital investment and advisory firm. Ed was a co-founder of Flagship Ventures and served as Flagship’s Chairman from 2003 to 2014. He continues to serve as a co-managing partner for Flagship Funds II-IV and as an advisory partner to the firm.

Prior to Flagship, Ed spent 17 years as an associate and then general partner at Morgan Holland Ventures, which in 1995 was renamed OneLiberty Ventures. From 1983 to 1984 he served as an investment officer at First Capital Corporation of Boston, the venture capital subsidiary of Bank of Boston. Earlier, he had worked as a research associate at Harvard Business School and in the hospitality industry as the general manager at J. Cunningham Inc. / Holiday Hill in Cheshire, Connecticut.

Throughout his career, Ed has integrated his roles as investor and active partner to entrepreneurs in company building. His direct investment experience covers over 100 companies, primarily in the life sciences and healthcare sectors but also across a broad range of emerging technologies. In addition, he has been intimately involved in the launch and subsequent growth of over two dozen startups. Several of these companies are now publicly traded while others have been acquired by significant publicly-traded companies. The total value of the companies in which Ed has participated as founding or lead investor is well over ten billion dollars.

Currently, Ed is a director of Flagship portfolio company EcoSense Lighting. He also serves on the boards of DataCore Software, Health Data Analytics Institute, TransMedics, and Vyriad. Among the companies for which Ed previously served as a director are Acceleron Pharma, Adolor, Alere Corp., Anesta Corp., Aspect Medical, AudioLogic, ChemGenics Pharmaceuticals, Cytyc Corp Exact Sciences,., Interactive Supercomputing, Ontogeny/Curis, PerSeptive Biosystems, Selecta Somatogen, TARIS Biomedical, VisEn Medical, and Visterra. He was also a founding investor in IDEXX Laboratories and TripAdvisor.

Since 2001, Ed has been on the advisory board of Ashford Capital, a long-term investor in rapidly growing, pre-institutionalized public companies. He serves on the board of directors for Business Executives for National Security (BENS, Washington, D.C.). He was a long-time director at MassBio as well as the long-time chairman of the board at Common Impact, a non-profit organization that connects skilled professionals from global corporations to local, high-potential non-profits.

Ed earned his undergraduate degree in physics from Dartmouth College and his MBA from Harvard Business School. While at Dartmouth, he was an All-American track and field athlete and a national and collegiate record holder.