David Magerman is the founder and President of Tzemach David, known as the Kohelet Foundation in the United States. Through his foundation, he has supported Jewish education in Philadelphia, the United States, and Israel since 2009. He has supported a number of philanthropic initiatives: The Kohelet Fellowships, The Kohelet Prize, The Yeshiva Lab School at Kohelet Yeshiva, the Philadelphia Jewish Day School Collaborative, The Smart School Initiative, and many others. Privately, he has funded a number of projects through Koren Publications, including the Ani Tefilla Educational Siddur Series, the Magerman Shabbat Chumash, the Sacks Tanakh project, the Children's Tanakh Series, and the Steinsaltz Tanya. He is also a supporter of Momentum Unlimited, Partners in Torah, the Orthodox Union, Chabad, Yeshiva University, and a number of other Jewish organizations.
Professionally, David is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Differential Ventures. Previously, he spent the entirety of his career at Renaissance Technologies, widely recognized as the world’s most successful quantitative hedge fund management company. He helped found the equities trading group at Renaissance, joining the group in its earliest days, playing a lead role in designing and building the trading, simulation, and estimation software. After a decorated career in quantitative finance, he is using his data science, software development, and statistical modeling expertise to help startups succeed in the global marketplace.
David holds a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University where his thesis on Natural Language Parsing as Statistical Pattern Recognition was an early and successful attempt to use large-scale data to produce fully-automated syntactic analysis of text. David also earned a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Sciences and Information from the University of Pennsylvania.