Neil Cohen

Neil Cohen is a Manhattan-trained investment banker who co-founded American Rock Salt Company, the largest-producing salt mine in the United States, after the historic Retsof mine collapsed and flooded in the 1990s. As Founder, Co-CEO and Vice Chairman, he helped assemble the financing for the first successful new U.S. salt mine in over four decades, in Mount Morris, New York. In parallel he runs Emerald Development Managers LP, an early-stage venture capital firm he founded in 1994, backing science-heavy startups in diagnostics, digital pathology, nanotechnology and fuel cells. His career spans the deeply physical (20,000 tons of rock salt a day, mined 1,200 feet underground) and the deeply speculative (frontier-tech venture bets).