Edwin M. Kania

Ed Kania is the managing partner of FarField Partners, a personal venture capital investment and advisory firm. Ed is also the co-founder of Flagship Pioneering, a leading life sciences venture firm based in Cambridge, MA. He served as Flagship’s Chairman from 2003 to 2014 and continues as co-managing partner for three of the original Flagship Funds and as an advisory partner to the firm. In addition, he remains a trusted advisor to entrepreneurial CEOs within the Flagship family and beyond.

Ed has been in the venture industry since 1983. Prior to co-founding Flagship in 2001, he spent 17 years as an associate and then a general partner of Morgan, Holland Ventures, which, in 1995 when Ed became managing partner, was renamed OneLiberty Ventures. Following two initial Morgan, Holland Funds, OneLiberty raised and managed three early-stage, technology venture capital funds. OneLiberty also provided the launching institutional Limited Partner base for Flagship Pioneering which raised its eighth fund in 2019. Ed started in the venture industry with First Capital Corporation of Boston, a subsidiary of Bank of Boston. Earlier, he had worked in the hospitality industry as the general manager at J. Cunningham Inc. / Holiday Hill in Cheshire, CT.

Throughout his career, Ed has deeply integrated his roles as investor and active partner to entrepreneurs in company building. His direct investment experience covers over 100 companies, primarily in the life sciences and healthcare sectors but also across a broad range of emerging technologies. He has been intimately involved in the launch and subsequent growth of over two dozen startups. Several of these companies are now publicly traded while others have been acquired by significant publicly-traded companies. The market value of the companies in which Ed participated as founding or lead investor is well over ten billion dollars.

Among the companies for which Ed has served as an active director are Acceleron Pharma, Adolor Corp., Alere Corp., Anesta Corp., Aspect Medical, AudioLogic, ChemGenics Pharmaceuticals, Cytyc Corp., EXACT Sciences, Interactive Supercomputing, PerSeptive Biosystems, Somatogen, Taris, and Visterra. He was a founding investor in several of these companies including such industry-defining successes as Cytyc, EXACT, IDEXX, and TripAdvisor. Ed’s current director positions include DataCore Software, Korrus/EcoSense, Health Data Analytics Institute, TransMedics, and Vyriad.

Since 2001, Ed has been on the advisory board of Ashford Capital, a long-term investor in rapidly growing, pre-institutionalized public companies. He serves on the board of directors for Business Executives for National Security (BENS, Washington, D.C.) and endeavors to stay current on issues of national competitiveness and strategy. He was a long-time director at MassBio as well as the long-time chairman of the board at Common Impact, a non-profit organization that connects skilled professionals from global corporations to local, high potential non-profits.

Ed earned his undergraduate degree in physics from Dartmouth College (1979) and his MBA from Harvard Business School (1982). While at Dartmouth, he was an All-American track & field athlete and a national and collegiate record holder. Ed and his wife, Ann, live in Cambridge, MA and Peterborough, NH and have three daughters.