Mr. Thomas H. Scholl - Doctor of Letters

Thomas H. Scholl  Download Photo

Mr. Thomas H. Scholl is a successful entrepreneur, technology innovator and investor. He has been directly involved in more than 40 start-ups with differing roles including founder, chairman, CEO, board member and investor. He is experienced in both hardware and software products – typically created from deep intellectual property.

Most recently, Scholl was venture partner at Novak Biddle Venture Partners in Bethesda, Maryland. As a venture capitalist for more than 10 years, Scholl played a pivotal role identifying, investing in and counseling portfolio companies from early stage/seed investment through successful exit. He sat on the boards of Paratek (acquired by RIM/Blackberry), Command Information (acquired by Salient Federal Solutions), Woodwind Communications (acquired by Vina), Vubiquity, Princeton Optronics, and Fiberzone. In 2011, Scholl was recognized as the venture capital “Friend of the Entrepreneur” by the Washington Business Journal. 

Prior to joining Novak Biddle, Scholl co-founded and was chairman of Cognio, a pioneering developer of software radio, cognitive spectrum management and MIMO antenna technology for wireless applications. Cognio was acquired by Cisco in October 2007. Scholl was also a private investor in Broadsoft (IPO) and served as a director of Torrent Networking (acquired by Ericsson), Integrated Telecom (acquired by PMC Sierra), NEC's eLuminant and Siemen's Optisphere. 

In 1990, Scholl founded Telogy Networks, a leader in providing reference designs and embedded software products for world-class customers including Cisco, Motorola, Samsung, NEC, Nortel, Alcatel, Siemens and many others. In 1998, Motorola acquired Telogy's digital mobile handset design business, and in 1999 Texas Instruments acquired Telogy as the world leader in embedded VOIP software – licensing more than one million VOIP “sockets.” As Telogy's CEO, Scholl was honored as the 1995 Joseph A. Sciulli "Entrepreneur of the Year" by the Maryland High Technology Council.

Prior to Telogy, Scholl was senior vice president of engineering at Hughes Network Systems (now a subsidiary of EchoStar and originally a combination of Digital Communications and Linkabit). He began his professional career as a systems programmer at the Central Intelligence Agency.

Scholl is a graduate of Purdue University in philosophy and literature, and serves as a member of the Dean's Advisory Council of the College of Liberal Arts, receiving Purdue's Distinguished Alumnus Award in 2009. Tom is a trustee at Stevens Institute of Technology and also serves as the chairman of the Research Enterprise and Technology Commercialization Committee. He is a member of the Board of Trustees at the University of Maryland Foundation and chairman of the Board of Visitors at the A. James Clark School of Engineering. He is a past trustee at Capitol College.

Scholl has six patents relating to software, the Internet, and digital telephone systems, and he is the author of "Packet Switching" in McGraw Hill's Electronic Communications Handbook. He is a member of IEEE and ACM, and he attended the Executive Management (non-degree) program at MIT's Sloan School.