Dean Newton - Chairman & General Partner

Dean Newton is Chairman and General Partner of Relevance Ventures, based in Nashville, Tennessee.  Prior to joining Relevance, Dean served as Chief Legal Officer of Transact Campus Inc., a leading Fintech solutions provider to Higher Education institutions headquartered in Scottsdale, Arizona.  A member of the company's C Suite, Dean helped guide Transact through a carve-out, COVID, and multiple acquisitions, culminating in a successful $1.6 billion exit to Roper Technologies, more than doubling the company's enterprise value in five years.  A member of the Patawomeck Tribe of Virginia, Dean is one of the few Native American executives to successfully drive a private equity-backed company to a ten-figure exit to a publicly traded company.  His professional experience includes serving as Chief Operating Officer of Emotive Communications, a company he co-founded in 2006 to enable the peer-to-peer distribution of media through mobile devices.  Dean also served as General Counsel at Moviso, the first and largest ringtone company in North America.  Dean joined the company as co-founder, where he authored the first licensing structures that brought music to mobile phones, and helped successfully lead the company through its acquisition by Vivendi-Universal and subsequent acquisition by InfoSpace Inc.  He is a music and technology attorney by training, having worked at Gang, Tyre, Ramer & Brown in Beverly Hills, California, where his practice included representing recording artists and media companies in entertainment-related transactions. He began his career in corporate practice with Los Angeles-based firm Gibson, Dunn, & Crutcher LLP. Dean is a graduate of Harvard University, where he received both B.A. and J.D. degrees, and Chairman of the Native American Capital and Investment Alliance. He serves on the Boards of several companies and other organizations and remains an avid dog enthusiast.