Kevin Ryan

Founder & CEO AlleyCorp

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Kevin Ryan is the founder and chief executive of AlleyCorp, a New York firm whose distinguishing habit is that it starts companies rather than merely funding them. The model is a direct extension of his own career: he ran DoubleClick as President and then CEO through the entire arc from a 20-person startup to a listed company with more than 1,500 employees, and then spent the following two decades co-founding businesses — MongoDB, Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, Nomad Health, Transcend Therapeutics — rather than picking them. The nickname that follows him, “Godfather of NYC tech”, describes both the density of that output and the fact that so much of New York’s technology industry passed through DoubleClick or one of its successors. AlleyCorp writes pre-seed and seed cheques, often the first into a company, and incubates ventures out of its own thesis work; Ryan says he sits on ten company boards.

Career Highlights

• Founder and CEO of AlleyCorp, confirmed on the firm’s own team page and, independently, by a Form D/A filed with the SEC in June 2026 naming him an executive officer of AlleyCorp Partners II LP.
• Raised AlleyCorp Partners II LP, formed in 2025 with a $335 million offering, recorded as fully sold in that June 2026 filing.
• President and then Chief Executive Officer of DoubleClick, Inc. from July 1996 to July 2005, growing it from 20 people to a publicly traded company of more than 1,500 and taking it through its 1998 IPO; Google acquired the business in 2007.
• Co-founded MongoDB, served on its board from 2008, and was its chairperson until his term expired at the 2019 annual meeting.
• Co-founded Gilt Groupe in April 2007 and chaired it until February 2016; the company was sold to Hudson’s Bay Company that year.
• Co-founded Business Insider, which was sold in September 2015.
• Co-founded Zola, where he is chairman, plus Nomad Health, Co-Edition, Workframe, BACA Coffee, Samada Holdings and Transcend Therapeutics.
• Named Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst & Young; named by The Observer one of the 100 Most Influential New Yorkers of the past 25 years; named one of Crain’s New York Business’s 50 Most Influential Business People and later inducted into its Hall of Fame.

Professional Journey

Ryan joined DoubleClick in 1996, when online advertising was an idea rather than an industry, and stayed nine years — first as President, then as Chief Executive Officer. The company went public in 1998 and, by the time he left in July 2005, employed more than 1,500 people worldwide. It is the formative episode in his career for reasons beyond scale: DoubleClick trained a generation of New York operators, and the network of people who worked there became the raw material of everything he built afterwards.

What followed was not a second act but a machine for producing them. In April 2007 he co-founded Gilt Groupe, the flash-sale retailer, and chaired it until February 2016, the year Hudson’s Bay Company bought it. In the same period he co-founded MongoDB — the open-source database company that has since become one of the most valuable businesses to come out of New York — joining its board in 2008 and serving as chairperson. He co-founded Business Insider, sold in September 2015, and Zola, the wedding-planning and registry company he still chairs. Alongside those came Nomad Health, a marketplace for healthcare jobs; Co-Edition; Workframe; BACA Coffee; and Transcend Therapeutics, working on next-generation psychoactive therapeutics.

AlleyCorp is the institutional form of that pattern. Founded with former DoubleClick CTO Dwight Merriman, it operates as both a venture firm and a studio: it invests primarily at pre-seed and seed, often writing the first cheque, makes selective Series A investments, and incubates companies of its own in areas it has decided to pursue — healthcare, robotics, climate, AI infrastructure — carrying them from thesis to founding team. It also runs a dedicated social impact vertical that funds both for-profit and non-profit organisations building technology for low-income and underserved families. The firm’s second institutional fund, AlleyCorp Partners II LP, was formed in 2025 and had sold its full $335 million by mid-2026.

His MongoDB board service ended in 2019, when his term expired at the annual meeting and Tom Killalea succeeded him as chairperson — the company recorded its thanks in the proxy. That transition is worth noting precisely because his co-founder title at MongoDB is permanent and easily mistaken for a continuing role.

Outside company-building, Ryan has been unusually active in New York civic life. Governor Cuomo appointed him to the three-member Fast Food Wage Board that successfully pushed through a wage increase for the state’s fast food workers; he served on the state’s Backend Expenses Commission and on an MTA commission tasked with applying startup technology to accessibility and congestion. He is a founding board member of Tech:NYC and chairs its Policy Committee, is Vice Chairman of The Partnership for New York City, a Director Emeritus at Human Rights Watch, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Earlier board service included Yale University, Yale University Press, INSEAD, Mercy Corps, the NYC Investment Fund, the Trust for Governors Island and the advisory board of Doctors Without Borders. He and his wife Pascaline Servan-Schreiber support University of the People, The Marshall Project, MLT, Endeavor, the Fund for Public Health in NYC and the Center for Mindful Learning, and he is among the leading funders of the Yale Program for Psychedelic Science.

Education

Yale University

B.A.

INSEAD

M.B.A.