About

Brendan Egan is an entrepreneur, investor, author, and technology executive who has spent two decades building, scaling, investing in, and advising companies across technology, artificial intelligence, digital marketing, energy, entertainment, consumer products, and business services.

Over the course of his career, Brendan has founded more than a dozen companies, helped build businesses across seven-, eight-, and nine-figure valuations, and successfully navigated multiple strategic exits and investment transactions. While the industries have changed, his approach has remained remarkably consistent: find something that can work better, assemble the technology and people to improve it, and turn an ambitious idea into a scalable business that creates lasting value.

Growing up in suburban Chicago, Brendan started his first business at just 10 years old, raking leaves and shoveling snow around his neighborhood. Before long, he was recruiting friends to help complete the work while he focused on finding customers, managing relationships, and growing the operation. It was a small neighborhood business, but many of the lessons — sales, delegation, customer service, and the power of building a team — would follow him throughout his career.

His first meaningful venture came years later amid the disruption of the 2008 financial crisis. While still in college, Brendan became an active trader and launched Learn To Trade, one of his first online businesses. The platform combined digital education, training, and an online community for aspiring traders. Brendan grew the company and ultimately sold it to a competitor, giving him his first experience building a company from an idea through an eventual exit.

Around the same time while still attending college, Brendan founded Simple SEO Group. What began as a small digital marketing startup grew over the following years into an established technology and marketing company serving more than 500 businesses, from emerging companies to major national and global brands. Under Brendan’s leadership, Simple SEO Group built deep expertise across search engine optimization, paid media, web development, marketing technology, digital strategy, and the rapidly evolving intersection between traditional search and artificial intelligence. After years of sustained growth, Brendan led Simple SEO Group through a significant private equity investment, positioning the company for its next phase while continuing to support its leadership, clients, and strategic direction.

Brendan then went on to found ASTRAVI. ASTRAVI is a next-generation AI enablement platform built around a challenge he believes virtually every organization will face: artificial intelligence is advancing extraordinarily quickly, but most companies and employees are still figuring out how to actually use it effectively. ASTRAVI is being developed to bridge that gap—helping organizations identify opportunities for AI, improve workforce productivity, encourage meaningful adoption, and implement artificial intelligence in a structured, measurable way across their businesses. The company represents a culmination of much of Brendan’s work across software, AI, automation, marketing, enterprise technology, and business transformation and is a major focus of his next chapter as an entrepreneur.

ASTRAVI builds on work Brendan began years earlier through Apollo Automation, the AI, automation, and robotics company he founded to bring emerging technologies into real-world business environments. Apollo has worked across software automation, artificial intelligence, workflow improvement, facility automation, and robotics, with a particular focus on helping small and midsized businesses do more with technology while reducing repetitive and inefficient processes.

Brendan’s portfolio extends well beyond AI. He co-founded and serves as CEO of Engage, a technology platform created to modernize the traditionally fragmented process of booking speakers, athletes, entertainers, executives, and other talent. Brendan helped build the company from its earliest stages, led it through seed and institutional funding rounds, and helped establish Engage as a significant technology platform within the talent and experiences industry.

He is also an investor in Trajectory Energy Partners, a rapidly growing solar development company that has developed projects across the Midwest and beyond. Brendan participated in the company’s seed stage and has supported its growth through technology, digital strategy, marketing, and other initiatives.

In 2026, Brendan made a significant growth investment in Achilles, a patented sports recovery technology company whose products are used throughout professional and collegiate athletics. The company entered a significant new growth phase following a strategic distribution relationship with Mueller Sports Medicine, creating an opportunity to bring its recovery technology to a substantially larger market.

At ERI, the largest electronics recycling and IT asset disposition company in North America and one of the largest organizations of its kind in the world, Brendan serves as Director of Marketing, Innovations & Technology and as a member of the Board of Directors. He chairs the company’s Technology and Audit committees and works across artificial intelligence, automation, robotics, cybersecurity, digital transformation, emerging technology, and marketing. The role gives Brendan an opportunity to work at a very different scale—helping a large, international organization evaluate and implement technologies that can transform physical operations, information systems, workforce productivity, and the way an established industry operates.

Across these companies and investments as well as numerous others, Brendan regularly works alongside founders, executive teams, boards, investors, engineers, and operators on growth strategy, technology adoption, product development, marketing, operations, acquisitions, capital allocation, and enterprise value creation. He is especially drawn to situations where an established industry is approaching an inflection point—where a new technology, business model, or way of thinking has the potential to meaningfully change what comes next.

Brendan is also a best selling author. His first book, 101 Tips From the Marketing Masters, became a bestseller in multiple Amazon categories, and he later co-authored a second book. Over the years, his work and perspectives on entrepreneurship, marketing, technology, and artificial intelligence have been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, USA Today, The Huffington Post, and dozens of other publications and media outlets.

Away from the boardroom and the computer screen, Brendan has always been drawn to a different kind of challenge: aviation. He is a commercially rated pilot with an instrument rating and more than 1,000 hours of flight experience. Through Captain Maverick, the aviation holding and media company he founded, Brendan combines his passion for flying with content and entertainment, documenting aircraft ownership, challenging flights, business travel, and general aviation adventures for a rapidly growing online audience.

For Brendan, flying shares many of the qualities that initially attracted him to entrepreneurship: preparation matters, conditions change quickly, calculated risks are unavoidable, and there is always something new to learn.

He is also an avid boater, wakesurfer, traveler, and outdoor enthusiast and lives with his wife, Allison, in the Chicago area.

Today, Brendan remains actively involved in the companies he has helped build while increasingly dedicating his time and capital to new businesses and investments at the intersection of artificial intelligence, technology, automation, and business transformation. Whether building a company from scratch, helping an established organization reinvent the way it operates, or backing another entrepreneur’s vision, Brendan continues to pursue the same idea that has driven him since his first neighborhood business:

There is almost always a better way to build something.