Eric Lefkofsky

Origins and early life

Eric Paul Lefkofsky was born in West Bloomfield, Michigan, on 2 September 1969, the youngest of three children of an engineer and a teacher, and he grew up in nearby Southfield. He grew up in a Jewish family, and in 2011 he told Moment magazine that he thought of himself first as an American and then as a Jew, but was absolutely connected to Judaism; in 2019 Temple Israel, the West Bloomfield synagogue, named a new prayer space after his parents, Sandy and Bill.

He went to Tamarack Camps as a camper and later as a counsellor, then studied at the University of Michigan, graduating in 1991, and took his law degree there in 1993.

Work and career

With his classmate Brad Keywell he ran a clothing company, Brandon Apparel, and in 1999 the two moved to Chicago and founded Starbelly, an early internet company they sold nine months later. He went on to co-found InnerWorkings, a print buyer, in 2001, the freight firm Echo Global Logistics in 2005 and MediaBank, later Mediaocean, in 2006. Groupon grew out of an idea pitched by Andrew Mason, an InnerWorkings employee: Lefkofsky and Keywell seeded it, the group-coupon site opened in Chicago in November 2008 and went public in 2011, with Lefkofsky as chairman and later chief executive.

In 2014 his wife, Liz, was diagnosed with breast cancer, and struck by how little data reached her care, he spent a year talking to oncologists before founding Tempus in Chicago in 2015. Tempus sequences the tumours of cancer patients and analyses the results with artificial intelligence against a large library of clinical data, to help doctors reach a more precise diagnosis and treatment; it went public in June 2024 as Tempus AI.

In 2006 he and Liz created the Lefkofsky Family Foundation, in 2013 they signed the Giving Pledge, promising more than half of their wealth to charity, and in November 2024 he became chairman of the board of the Art Institute of Chicago.