Audrey MacLean is an American business woman and entrepreneur. She was been featured on Forbes’ Midas Touch List, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women and Business Week’s Top 50 Business Women in America

A native of Warwick, New York, she attended Long Island University before heading to the West coast and earning a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Redlands

University of Redlands

The University of Redlands is a private liberal arts and sciences university located in Redlands, California. The university's campus sits on near downtown Redlands. The university was founded in 1907 and was associated with the American Baptist Church. The land for the university was donated by...

. In the summer of 1982, she cofounded Network Equipment Technologies. Later, she was the founder and CEO of, Adaptive Corp., a maker of high-speed switches.

She has provided seed financing to numerous successful start-ups including Pure Software

Pure Software

Pure Software was founded in October 1991 by Reed Hastings and Mark Box. The original product was a debugging tool for Unix/C engineers called Purify. After adding new products such as Quantify and PureLink, and doubling its revenue every year for four years, Pure Software went public with the...

, Pete's Brewing Company

Pete's Brewing Company

Pete's Brewing Company was founded by homebrewer Pete Slosberg in 1986. Its major product line is Pete's Wicked Ale, an American Brown Ale that is 5.3% alcohol by volume. The company was acquired by The Gambrinus Company in 1998, a company that owns the Spoetzl Brewery in Texas, the Bridgeport...

, AdForce

AdForce

AdForce , founded by Chad Steelberg & Ryan Steelberg in 1995 and grown into the world’s largest centralized independent ad serving and management solution, was acquired by CMGI after going public for more than $500 million US dollars in 1999. AdForce won the Smithsonian Award for the Best...

 and Selectica. Today, she is an active investor and currently serves on the board or advisory board of almost a dozen other start-ups including: Andalou, BeyondCore, Coraid, Finesse, Loopt

Loopt

Loopt is a company based in Mountain View, California, United States. Loopt produces mobile Location-based services that allow users to discover the world around them, and find and enjoy the friends, places and events around them....

, Luxe, mOasis, Queplix, Skybox, SolumTech, and StarMaker. Working with the new generation of entrepreneurs, she is often called on for her advice.

MacLean currently is an advisor to Foundation Capital

Foundation capital

Foundation Capital is a venture capital firm located in Silicon Valley. The firm was founded in 1995, and manages over $2.4 billion in investment capital. It raised its seventh and largest fund of $750 million in April 2008...

 and serves on the faculty at Stanford University

Stanford University

The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

's Graduate School of Engineering.
In May 2011, she received the third Symons Innovator Award given annually by NCWIT to honor successful women entrepreneurs in technology.