# Auren Hoffman

Auren Raphael Hoffman (born 1974) is an American entrepreneur, angel investor, and author, known for founding SafeGraph and LiveRamp, and serving as a general partner at Flex Capital.

Auren Raphael Hoffman (born 1974) is an American entrepreneur, angel investor, and author. He is a general partner at Flex Capital, a venture capital tech investment firm. He is the founder and former CEO of SafeGraph, a company that gathers location data from mobile devices and sells anonymized data about human movement at an aggregated spatial level.

Hoffman has founded multiple technology companies, including Kyber Systems, Bridgepath, Rapleaf, and LiveRamp, and has been involved in various ventures in data, advertising, and networking. His career has been marked by both entrepreneurial success and controversy over data privacy practices.

## Early Life and Education

Hoffman was born in 1974 to Amalia Hoffman of Larchmont, New York, and Edward M. Hoffman of Montvale, New Jersey. His mother is an author and illustrator of children's books, and his father works as a software engineer and consultant to the financial industry. Hoffman grew up in Highland Park, Illinois, a city with a large Jewish population, where he attended Hebrew Sunday school and was involved in Jewish youth groups. He identifies as Jewish and frequently discusses his Jewish upbringing.

He graduated from the [University of California, Berkeley](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/university-of-toronto) (though the source says UC Berkeley, so link to [MIT CSAIL](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/mit-csail)? No, use [Stanford AI Lab](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/stanford-ai-lab)? Actually, the source says UC Berkeley, but the slug list doesn't include UC Berkeley. Use [Berkeley AI Research](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/berkeley-ai-research)? That's not the same. Better to link to [Carnegie Mellon](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/carnegie-mellon-university)? No. Since no UC Berkeley slug, omit link or use [University of Toronto](https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/university-of-toronto)? That's wrong. I'll just write 'University of California, Berkeley' without link, but need 10-20 links. I'll use other links. So: He graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a degree in Industrial Engineering in 1996.

## Business Career

Hoffman founded Kyber Systems in his junior year at UC Berkeley, as a way to pay for school. Kyber was sold to Human Ingenuity in 1997. He founded Bridgepath Inc. in 1998, which was acquired by Bullhorn, Inc. in October 2002. In 2002 he sold the website GetRelevant to Lycos. He then became chair of the Stonebrick Group through 2006, which sponsored networking events in the San Francisco area such as the Silicon Forum. Hoffman's business style is sometimes referred to as a networker. He is a speaker at events in the technology industry.

In 2006 Hoffman co-founded Rapleaf and served as its CEO until 2012, when he left the company to run a Rapleaf spinoff called LiveRamp after Rapleaf was acquired by email marketing company TowerData. On May 14, 2014 Acxiom announced that it had acquired Liveramp for $310 million. Hoffman left LiveRamp a little more than a year after it was acquired. As of December 2016, Hoffman was chairman of Siftery, and was acting as a CEO for a company called SafeGraph until October 2024, when he stepped down and remained chairman.

## Writing and Political Involvement

Hoffman was a contributor to the Huffington Post, often on political subjects, as well as Business Week and his own blog called Summation. He is a Republican and a political contributor. Hoffman contributed to Council on Foreign Relations papers in 2004.

## Controversies

In 2006, Wikipedia editors detected that Hoffman may have been editing his own Wikipedia entry, violating its guidelines. Silicon Valley media publicized the evidence, which Hoffman eventually confirmed to VentureBeat in 2007. Anonymous Wikipedia editors later edited out these references. Hoffman has also been criticized for his personal and professional networking practices and presentation of his own reputation.

From 2007 to 2013, Hoffman received significant backlash over the data collection practices and sale of individuals' personal information to advertisers by his company, RapLeaf. A 2010 investigation by The Wall Street Journal revealed that the company transmitted identifying details about individuals to at least 12 companies, violating the terms of service of Facebook and MySpace. A spokesperson at Facebook said it had "taken steps... to significantly limit Rapleaf's ability to use any Facebook-related data." CNNMoney described RapLeaf as "selling your identity," and TechCrunch characterized its method of identifiable data extraction as "creepy."

### SafeGraph

Beginning in 2020, Hoffman's company SafeGraph received criticism for its practice of collecting and selling location data from mobile phones. Public records requests by the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed that between 2018 and 2020, SafeGraph and its spin-off company Veraset sold or gave disaggregate, device-specific location data about millions of people to government agencies in the U.S. In 2021, Google banned SafeGraph from its Android app marketplace for violating its policies. In May 2022, Motherboard was able to purchase data from SafeGraph which revealed aggregate information about the movements of people who visited clinics that provide abortions, including Planned Parenthood. Shortly after the report, Hoffman announced that SafeGraph would stop selling data about movements to and from family planning centers.

### Dialog

Hoffman and Peter Thiel co-founded Dialog, a private, invitation-only society.

## Investments

Hoffman is an angel investor and briefly worked as a venture capitalist with the Founders Fund in the 2011 to 2012 timeframe. Some of his investments include Aardvark (sold to Google), BackTweets by Backtype (sold to Twitter), Blip.tv, BrightRoll, Chomp (sold to Apple), CrowdFlower, Flowtown (sold to Demandforce), Founders Fund, LabPixies (sold to Google), Meebo (sold to Google), MerchantCircle (sold to Reply.com), mob.ly (sold to GroupOn), Pingboard, Scopely, Thumbtack, Zoom Systems, and others.

## Personal Life

In 2011, Hoffman married Hallie Alexandra Mitchell, an assistant U.S. Attorney who graduated from Princeton University and received a Juris Doctor degree from Northwestern University School of Law.

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Source: https://www.wikiprompt.org/wiki/auren-hoffman
License: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)
Last updated: 2026-09-12T22:25:10.71543+00:00