Nathan Eagle is an American technology executive. He is best known as the CEO and co-founder of Jana (formerly txteagle), a company that subsidizes mobile internet access in emerging markets. He has also served as a professor at both Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As a research scientist at MIT and Fulbright Professor at the University of Nairobi in 2006, Eagle developed a mobile phone programming curriculum that has been adopted by twelve Sub-Saharan computer science departments, leading to hundreds of mobile applications.
As a postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute in 2010, he and Eric Horvitz launched an initiative called Artificial Intelligence for Development. This initiative led to a diverse set of projects ranging from computational models of food shortages to studies on the dynamics of slums.
As an adjunct assistant professor at Harvard University in 2011, he formed the Engineering Social Systems group, with researchers in fields ranging from epidemiology and public health to statistical physics and urban planning, dedicated to the analysis of large scale data for social purposes.
Eagle has authored 8 patents and over 100 peer reviewed publications in journals including Science and Nature, accumulating more than 10,000 citations. Eagle's book from MIT Press, Reality Mining: Using Big Data to Engineer a Better World, won the 2015 American Publishers PROSE Award.
Eagle led Jana to profitability in 2015, in large part due to partnerships with technology companies including Google, Microsoft, Twitter, and Amazon. Eagle subsequently raised an additional $57 million round of funding led by Verizon, with Tim Armstrong joining the advisory board, expanding Jana's service to 90 countries though partnerships with 311 mobile operators. By 2017, Jana was regularly providing up to 70 megabytes of free data per day to 40 million people. By 2019, 75 million people had used Jana's products to gain affordable access to the internet.
Eagle became a vocal advocate of net neutrality and Jana's social mission to provide unrestricted internet access for a billion people. He often emphasized that if Jana succeeds in redirecting 30% of the $200 billion spent on advertising in the developing world into subsidies for mobile internet, that would be the equivalent of giving one billion people a 5% raise.
Eagle began to take an interest in the life sciences and joined the Longevity Fund as a Limited Partner in 2017. By 2019, after 12 years as CEO and raising nearly $100 million, Eagle stepped down from Jana to pursue entrepreneurial interests in synthetic biology and the biopharmaceutical industry full-time.
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