Charles O. Heller (Board of Advisors)

Charles O. Heller is President of Annapolis Capital Group, a management consulting and investment firm. Concurrently, he is Director and member of the investment committee of Athlone Global Security, an international venture capital fund, which invests in early-stage companies in the homeland security sector. Previously, he was General Partner of Gabriel Venture Partners, a bicoastal, early-stage, venture capital fund with $260M under management. From 1990 to 1999, Dr. Heller was Director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland. He built the center into one of the top-ranked in the nation and was named the University’s first-ever Professor of Practice. Charlie has been very active in the Mid-Atlantic business community for many years, as a successful entrepreneur, investor, board member, and mentor to many of the region’s startup ventures.

He was co-founder and CEO of CADCOM, Inc., a pioneer enterprise software company. After selling CADCOM, he led a management buy-out of a segment of the firm which became Intercad Corporation, a publishing software company; Dr. Heller was its CEO. He sits on a number of boards, including those of FBR Mutual Funds, Walden University (a public, for-profit, online university and subsidiary of Laureate), the Chesapeake Innovation Center, WebTide Technologies, and the Czechoslovak Society of Arts and Sciences (SVU). He holds three engineering degrees: BS and MS from Oklahoma State University, and Ph.D. from The Catholic University of America. He has been recipient of a number of awards, including Maryland’s “Entrepreneur-of-the-Year,” the Lohmann Medal (OSU’s highest award for engineering alumni), and CUA’s Alumni Achievement Award. He is a dual citizen of the US and the Czech Republic, his native country, in which he has business interests.