Born into Communism, reared under Socialism, and now thriving under Capitalism, Alex Mashinsky has become one of the most recognized figures in the international telecommunications industry. As the leading evangelist of the bandwidth-trading concept, Alex has proven his ability to identify the winning trends, build a powerful intellectual property portfolio, launch multiple businesses, and bring together winning teams to build a world-class company. Today, Arbinet-thexchange, of which Alex is founder and Vice Chairman is recognized as having created the spot market and designed and built the world's most advanced system to automate anonymous minutes trading between telecom companies.

Prior to focusing on the bandwidth trading opportunity, Alex successfully identified the coming trends of phone-to-phone calling over the Internet and the coming needs for softswitch technologies and was successful in securing some of the original patents covering protocol conversion and call processing when switching calls from the PSTN to the Internet and back to PSTN networks. He also created his own telephone operating system and built the world's largest operational softswitch in 1996 connecting 450 T-1s worldwide to 100 PCs in a platform that was used by AT&T, Telecom Italia, and Telstra among others. He later spun off that technology and co-founded Comgates (www.comgates.com ), a Herzeliya, Israel-based company which is now marketing the only operational softswitch capable of dynamic SIP to H323 conversion on the fly. Comgates currently has over 80 employees and has received follow-on venture funding of $20 million.

A featured speaker at over 120 international conferences on telecommunications and the Internet, a recipient of 17 domestic and international patents relating to communications infrastructure and signaling, Alex has also received numerous awards for innovation including the prestigious Technology Foresight Award for Innovation presented at last year's Telecom Geneva -- the largest telecom conference worldwide.

Alex attended Tel Aviv University and served in the Israel Defense Forces. As Chairman, interim CEO and CTO of VenturiFX, Alex is responsible for actively driving the VFX idea creation, intellectual property generation, and inventing session processes. He is also actively involved in technical due diligence and the business validation process.