Yobie Benjamin is a successful Filipino venture investor and innovator in gaming/games, blockchain technologies, autonomous mobility, life sciences, IoT, fintech, sustainability and consumer products. In recognition of his technology achievements, the World Economic Forum named him as a 2015 Technology Pioneer.
Currently CEO and Founder of Blockchip, Philippines – a global pioneer in gaming and social gaming apps. Blockchip’s site – ReadyPlayGo.com is the world’s first fully licensed blockchain-based and compliance-focused real money game AppStore.
He is also co-founder, senior advisor and/or mentor to several startups in the technology and synthetic biology space — AstroDigital.com (satellites and space imagery, satellite communications), CambrianInnovation.com (clean water and clean power), WildlifeWorks.com (forest and wildlife conservation/carbon credits), Moni.com (payments/FinTech) and IndieBio (synthetic biology accelerator).
In the ICO space, Benjamin is advisor to Loyalcoin and DBrain
He also serves as CTO Emeritus of Token.io, providing software to banks that enables them to issue a new payment type designed specifically for use in the digital era. Mr. Benjamin has recently raised $18.5MM for Token. Mr. Benjamin is a member of the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank Faster Payments Task Force’s Rules and Consumer Protection working groups. He is also an adjunct lecturer at Hong Kong Polytechnic University, teaching an executive education course on Global Angel Investing.
Previously, Mr. Benjamin was Global Chief Technology Officer for Citibank Institutional Clients Group/Global Transaction Services. At Citi, Mr. Benjamin was responsible for global money flows of $3 trillion to $9 trillion per day ($1.25 quadrillion/year). He was also Chairman of Citi’s Research Development Innovation & Learning Center. Prior to Citi, Mr. Benjamin was a Partner and Chief of Global Strategy at Ernst & Young, LLP.
He was a co-founder of Avegant, where he led the software development of the next generation of virtual reality and augmented/mixed reality devices (winner of a 2014 CNN Top 10 Technology Products award for the Avegant Glyph and Skully Systems AR1 Helmet).
Mr. Benjamin has also served as Managing Director/Partner at Computer Sciences Corporation. He was former chair of a civilian volunteer group of the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) AMES Collaboration Labs.
He is currently writing a book, “Tribes of the Valley” chronicling the different power tribes and groups in Silicon Valley. It is due for publication in Q1 of 2019.
Investment portfolio: Gusto.com ($178MM raised), Token.io ($18.5MM raised), Avegant ($58MM raised), Skyport Systems ($67M venture raised) acquired by Cisco February 2018