Nihal Mehta (born April 22, 1977 in Iowa ^[1]) is an American technology entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Mehta is a Founding General Partner at Eniac Ventures. He has more than 15 years experience in marketing technologies through founding five startups and investing in over 100 since 1999. ^[1]

Nihal Mehta lives in Chelsea, New York, with his wife Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, their son, Shaan and their beagle-bulldog, Stanley.

In 1999, Nihal Mehta graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Science. At UPenn, Nihal was a member of the Philomathean Society and the Pi Lambda Phi fraternity. ^[1]

Nihal Mehta started his first company Philly Tonight an online city guide website for the Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in 1999 and served as its CEO. He quickly raised a million dollars in angel financing and grew the company to 15 cities renaming it Urban Groove. At its peak the company had 2-3 million unique users. The company's business model was to create quality content about the city on the website and sell advertising space to businesses in the area. However when the dotcom bubble crashed in 2001 the company ran out of capital and went bankrupt. ^[1]

In 2001, Nihal Mehta founded the mobile marketing agency Ipsh!

with Mike Jelley and Par Gandhi and served as the company's CEO.

He started Ipsh!

as a spin off of a feature he developed for Urban Groove and rolled over all the investors from Urban Groove into Ipsh!.

The company started by signing up small record labels as clients and giving users who signed up for text message updates on new music releases.

The company then grew to selling to large record labels like Warner Brothers Records before selling to brands outside the music space. ^[1] In 2005, the company was acquired for under $10 million by Omnicom. Nihal stayed on leading Ipsh! until September, 2007.

In 2007, Nihal Mehta founded the social city guide app buzzd with Deepen Shah. The app uses location data from social media posts and check-ins to suggest nearby events to users.

In 2010, buzzd rebranded as LocalResponse a web-based tool that allows local businesses to respond to the “check-in” on social media sites with marketing campaigns to promote transactions.

LocalResponse aggregates real-­‐time social media check-­‐ins from Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Instagram and dozens of other services to provide a simple interface for local businesses to directly respond to their most influential and valuable customers.

As the founding CEO, Nihal Mehta grew LocalResponse's revenues 2153% over a three year period, which placed the company to #204 (#14 in NYC) to the 2014 Inc. 5000's Fastest Growing Companies and #67 to the 2013 Forbes list of America's Most Promising Companies.

In December, 2011 Nihal Mehta became a founding partner in the Indian Internet Group (IIG) a venture capital firm focused on making early stage investments in Indian technology and e-commerce start-ups.

At IIG he has invested in 24/7 Techies, abreakplease, and ekSMS among others.

Nihal founded M1 “Mobile-First” Summit in 2014, bringing together thousands of mobile innovators with two events/year in NYC and San Francisco.

Prior to founding Eniac Ventures, Nihal angel invested in AdMob (acquired by Google), SwiftKey (acquired by Microsoft), Tala, Tapad (acquired by Telenor), and Uber (company) among other startups.

In September, 2008 Nihal founded the venture capital firm Eniac Ventures with Hadley Harris, Vic Singh, and Tim Young. The firm focuses on seed stage investments and has over $100 million dollars under management with offices in New York City and San Francisco. At Eniac, Nihal has invested in Onswipe, Boxed, and Fitocracy among other startups.

After the 9/11 attacks, Nihal Mehta and a few friends launched Project Ahmisa, a benefit for victims of hate crimes. They initially raised money to benefit awareness and help Muslim and Hindu families who were targeted for hate crimes. It then morphed into a foundation that empowers children with music education as music can help create self confidence and help kids with empowerment. “Hopefully when things slow down in other ventures, I can spend more time on this,” says Mehta. “It keeps me balanced.”

Nihal also frequently guest lectures at business schools around the United States on entrepreneurship and mobile marketing, and is published in over 15 books and white papers on the subject.

^[1]