Pano AnthosFounder

United States - New York City Metropolitan Area

Passionate about helping early stage and early growth startups achieve market traction through acceleration.

With an awesome team, I started XRC Labs, an NYC-based venture fund and startup accelerator dedicated to fostering the next generation of disruptors in retail technology and consumer goods. We launched in 2015 and since then has invested in over 100 startups. We’re proud to have built a world-class ecosystem with corporate sponsors including Mastercard, The TJX Companies, Inc., Estee Lauder, GS1 and others. We also have a 330+ mentorship network, which includes today’s most influential retail leaders and consultancies.

As the former leader of the digital practice at Eaglepoint Advisors, I enjoyed the challenge of understanding how far retail was from digital excellence and served in a number of interim roles: from CEO to Chief Product Officer and Chief Digital Officer for media companies, retail, consumer durable goods and industrial companies.

Under Guided Launch, I advised or co-founded 4 digital media and software companies, including Gather Education, an ed-tech company building virtual reality classrooms that serve the 3G market.

Prior to Gather Ed, I co-founded Hangout Industries, which was the first to bring video game technology and name brands to Facebook in 2007 and grew the Hangout Facebook apps to millions of users, leveraging: media brands (e.g. NBA, Conde Nast); fashion brands (Steve Madden, Abigail Lorick, Rich and Skinny Jeans), and lifestyle brands (Red Bull and Skull Candy). We were a Techcrunch 50 finalist and MITX Digital Media winner for "Best Use of Technology" in 2008.

Previously, I co-founded two enterprise software companies, Pantero, which sold to Progress Software at 13x trailing revenues & Syntra/Clearcross, bootstrapped to over 1000 customers in 30 countries with one of the first commercially available Web Services (1999) that was licensed into Oracle ERP and embedded in their ERP suite.