Matt Carter | Chief Executive Officer
Matt is a cloud and technology industry veteran, leading Aryaka’s long-term market strategy and day-to-day operations, while guiding the company’s vision for an increasingly connected world.
Prior to this role, Matt served as President and CEO of Inteliquent Inc, a publicly traded provider of cloud-based networking services for global enterprises, which was successfully acquired by GCTR, a Chicago based PE firm.
Matt previously held a series of executive positions with Sprint Corporation where he successfully led several of its major businesses. This includes serving as President of the Sprint Enterprise Solutions business that provided a diversified portfolio of communication platforms to companies in over 165 countries globally. He also served as President of Boost Mobile, a leading provider of no contract wireless services.
Matt earned his master’s degree in general management from the Harvard Business School and his bachelor’s degree from Northwestern University.
Ashwath Nagaraj | Co-founder
As part of the founding team, Ashwath has been responsible for building Aryaka’s vision and technology since its inception in 2009.
Ashwath has previously been part of three successful San Francisco Bay Area companies. He was Founder, CTO and VP of Engineering at Allegro Systems, a security startup. Allegro Systems was acquired by Cisco Systems in September 2001 for $185M. At Cisco, Ashwath held senior management positions in the Security Technology Group, and the Internet Switching Business Unit. Prior to Allegro, Ashwath was part of the founding team at Assured Access Technologies, which developed WAN access and aggregation products. Assured Access was acquired by Alcatel in 1999 for $350M. Before Assured Access, Ashwath was one of the principal architects and Director (Engineering) at Mylex, a leading RAID/storage company in the SF Bay Area. He has also held management positions at Schlumberger, Tata Elxsi and PSI Data Systems.
He holds 17 patents in storage, security, architecture and networking.
Ashwath received his undergraduate degree in electronics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.
Bob Kelly | Goldman Sachs
Bob has 20+ years of experience in a variety of product management/marketing and strategy positions at Microsoft, first as Corporate Vice President of Product Management and Marketing for the Enterprise Server business. Bob then became the first business leader on Microsoft Azure as Corporate Vice President for Azure’s first 5 years. Bob’s last role at Microsoft was Corporate Vice President for the Cloud + Enterprise Business Development and Strategy Team and was responsible for the merger and acquisition strategy and coordination of cross-division strategic planning. Prior to joining Goldman as an Operating Partner, Bob was a General Partner at Ignition Partners investing in enterprise software startups. Bob has served on the boards of Nimble Storage, Skytap, Trifacta, Shyft, Amplero, Aryaka, Striim as well as many non-profit boards.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee | Nexus Venture Partners
Jishnu Bhattacharjee is Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners, a leading US – India venture capital firm, investing in innovative early to early-growth stage companies. Jishnu has invested in technology infrastructure, data, AI, SaaS and developer operations and is interested in a wide variety of start-ups. Jishnu’s current investments include Postman, Druva, H20.ai, Observe.ai, Minio, Kaltura, Blueshift, Jiffy.ai, and other exciting companies. His exited investments include Kaltura (Nasdaq: KLTR), Rancher (acquired by SUSE), Mezi (acquired by American Express), Cloud.com (acquired by Citrix), Gluster (acquired by Red Hat), Arkin (acquired by VMware) and Elastic Box (acquired by Century Link).
Jishnu holds MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, MS from Georgia Tech and BTech from IIT Kharagpur in electronics engineering. He is also an inventor on more than twenty US patents.
Fred Wang | General Partner, Trinity Ventures
Fred has more than 15 years of experience in venture capital. He currently invests in infrastructure, with a focus on digital media, and on specific sectors in clean tech. He is currently involved with 21ViaNet, Aryaka Networks, Avaak, ClearLeap, Exalt Communications, Enovix, Netcordia, Ankeena, and Soliant Energy. He has led investments in successful companies such as Aruba Networks (ARUN), Illuminet (ILUM), Modulus Video (acquired by Motorola), Network Access Solutions (NASC), Orative (acquired by Cisco), SevenSpace (acquired by Sun), Speedera Networks (acquired by Akamai), and Tut Systems (TUTS).
Prior to joining Trinity Ventures in 1999, he was a partner at Spectrum Equity Investors, making investments in infrastructure companies. Previously, Fred worked at The Boston Consulting Group working with clients such as Pacific Gas & Electric, Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), AT&T, and Apple Computer. Before BCG, Fred held operating positions in the New Technologies Group at Pacific Bell and at Intuit.
Fred is the President of the Western Association of Venture Capital (WAVC), an advisor to the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD), and is actively involved with the Harvard Business School Alumni Association of Northern California and the Stanford Challenge. Fred received his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, his M.S. in Industrial Engineering from Stanford University, and his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Jim Smith | General Partner, Mohr Davidow
Jim leads investments for Mohr Davidow in software and systems companies. He holds board seats with Mantara, PacketMotion, ParAccel, RingCube, and Xambala. Prior to Mohr Davidow, Jim developed computing architectures and integrated circuits for high performance multimedia systems at Silicon Graphics, Inc., including the multi-billion dollar revenue O2 and Octane workstation lines. He has authored and refereed numerous papers on computing systems and circuit design.
Jim received a doctorate in electrical engineering and a master’s degree in industrial management from Stanford University. He also earned a bachelor’s degree in computer systems engineering and a master’s degree in electrical engineering from Stanford.
Khaled Nasr | InterWest Partners
Khaled joined InterWest’s IT team in 2005 and focuses on investments in mobile, cloud and data center infrastructure, including systems, software and semiconductors.
Khaled is a board member of Aryaka, DataRPM, InVisage Technologies, NexPlanar, Pivot3, Quantance and Xirrus.
Prior to joining InterWest, Khaled invested in IT companies for Alta Partners where his investments included Synad (acquired by ST Microelectronics), Netli (acquired by Akamai), Celetronix (acquired by Jabil) and Occam Networks (OCNW; acquired by Calix). Prior to that, he spent 16 years in sales, marketing and general management positions with a succession of successful networking and telecommunications startups. He was president and chief executive officer of FlowWise Networks and general manager and vice president, International at Ipsilon. Before that, Khaled served as chief operating officer at Advanced Computer Communications (ACC), and as vice president of marketing and services with Premisys Communications. From 1987 to 1992, Khaled served as vice president of network services with Newbridge Networks. Khaled received his B.A. and M.A. in mathematics and social and political sciences from Cambridge University.
Rob Schwartz | Third Point Ventures
Since June 2000, Mr. Schwartz has been Managing Partner of Third Point Ventures, the Menlo Park, California based venture capital arm of Third Point LLC, which is a registered investment adviser based in New York and the investment manager of the Third Point Funds (AUM over $12B). Mr. Schwartz is presently a director of Kentik, Kumu Networks, Aryaka, Upstart, Precision Hawk, R2 Semiconductor, SentinelOne, YellowBrick Data, Channel Medsystems, Oppilan, and Rubryc Therapeutics, . Previously he lead investments in Radia Communications (acquired by Texas Instruments), LitePoint (acquired by Teradyne), Global Locate (Acquired by Broadcom), EnPhase Energy (Nasdaq : ENPH), Apigee (Nasdaq:APIC, Acquired by Alphabet/GOOG), IQ Engines (Acquired by Yahoo!), Elastica (acquired by BlueCoat), Swift Financial (Acquired by PayPal), CloudVelox (acquired by VMWare), and Packet (acquired by Equinix). Robert Schwartz was named to the Annual Always On List Of Top 100 Venture Capitalists. Previously, for 23 years, Mr. Schwartz was the President of RF Associates North, a privately held communications semiconductor manufacturer’s representative firm. Mr. Schwartz holds a multi-discipline engineering degree from the University of California at Berkeley.
