Education
Bragiel graduated from University of Illinois in 1999.
Bragiel graduated from University of Illinois in 1999.
Bragiel, the oldest child of Mary and Walter Bragiel, was raised in Mountain. Prospect & South Barrington, Illinois. In the late 90s, he was involved in the demoscene.
Shortly after graduating he founded his first company, Paragon 5, with offices in Chicago and Poland.
In 2004 he founded the first location-based social network Meetro. In 2008 he founded Lefora which was sold to Crowdgather in the summer of 2010.
In 2010 he launched i/o, a seed fund and accelerator based in San Francisco. Mentors include founders of companies such as YouTube, LinkedIn, Zynga, Bittorrent, Paypal, Myspace, WordPress, Yelp & Trulia.
In 2012 he launched three more technology-focused seed funds.
Savannah Fund (Sub-Saharan Africa) and Golden Gate (Southeast Asia) were created to foster entrepreneurship in those regions. Gamefounders (Eastern Europe) invests in companies building gaming-related products. In 2015 he launched Presence Capital, a $10m venture fund investing in early-stage virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (Arkansas) companies.
Collectively he"s invested or advised 100+ companies, which have raised $1.5b+ in follow-on financing.
Often he travels around the world to give lectures on startups and serves as an advisor to governments on their technology and entrepreneurship policy including the nations of Colombia, Singapore, Estonia and Tanzania. In 2013 Bragiel trained in cross country skiing in Finland with a view to compete in the 2014 Sochi under the Colombian flag.
In order to participate, Paul obtained Colombian citizenship by presidential decree and was soon globally addressed as the man who was hacking his way into the.