Bio

Tony Bifano is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Artists & Instigators. An investor in early stage businesses, Tony focuses on mobile location-based services, social gaming and sports & entertainment. A “lego-snapper,” Tony is passionate about connecting new ideas, emerging technology, and talented people together to assemble innovative companies that can revolutionize markets ripe for reinvention. A serial entrepreneur, Tony has launched, invested in, and advised early stage technology companies for 15 years. Always the student, Tony enjoys sharing ideas with students about what’s new and where it’s going. Tony is on the board of Durham based ReverbNation, a company that is reimaging the music economy digitally, New York based Ecko|Code, creating premium branded gaming, Philadelphia based Ryzing, a upstart social gaming company that builds games to do well while doing good, New York based MeetMoi, the next generation dating experience on your phone, and Philadelphia based Visibiz, bringing CRM to the people. Previously, Tony was a Managing Partner at SeventySix Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm that became A&I Ventures. Prior to SeventySix Capital, Tony both launched and helped grow multiple technology companies, including a novel startup using video motion capture to detect healthcare fraud, a healthcare startup that was building the largest healthcare provider database, and a technology platform that could integrate enterprise systems with no code. He launched his first business after a brief programming stint at Anderson Consulting Technology Practice. From his very first startup he launched in 1997, Egenda.net, Tony has been interested in applying technology to reinvent education. His company built an online community platform that was a pre-cursor to the modern social networking movement and launched Aroundcampus.com at universities. The service offered students and faculty an online personal information manager providing club and classroom information, web email, calendar, and no-code wizard driven publishing tools. The company also built the largest “hyper-local” campus advertising network comprised of 17,000 local merchants in 100+ college markets. Aroundcampus was subsequently acquired by White Directory, a division of the Hearst Corporation. Tony graduated as an Industrial Engineer from Penn State University.