Founding CEO at In-Q-Tel · Joined 1999
View Live Interactive Profile →Gilman Louie came to venture capital from an unlikely background - a video game industry executive who co-created the Falcon flight simulator and ran Spectrum Holobyte and MicroProse - before being named founding CEO of In-Q-Tel in 1999. Chartered by CIA Director George Tenet after the agency recognized it was falling behind Silicon Valley's pace of innovation, In-Q-Tel represented something unprecedented: a nonprofit venture fund built specifically to connect classified government needs with private-sector technology, rather than building everything in-house through traditional slow-moving procurement. Louie's most consequential bet came in 2003, when In-Q-Tel invested roughly $2 million in a then-unproven data analytics startup called Palantir - for years, In-Q-Tel and the CIA were essentially Palantir's only backers and only customers, providing critical early validation years before its 2020 direct listing at a valuation that eventually surpassed traditional defense contracting giants like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman.