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, Chief Technology Officer
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.
Brad Kinnish | Chief Financial Officer
Brad Kinnish is the Chief Financial Officer at Aryaka and is responsible for financial strategy and operations, including budgeting and planning, treasury, accounting, tax, financial reporting and investor relations.
Brad brings over 20 years of accounting and finance experience to his role as Aryaka’s Chief Financial Officer. Prior to joining Aryaka, he was the Chief Financial Officer at Marin Software, a publicly traded, software as a service (SaaS) company focused on digital advertising. Before that, he was at Deutsche Bank where he served as co-head of the Software Investment Banking practice. Prior to Deutsche Bank, Brad worked as an investment banker for Thomas Weisel Partners and Credit Suisse. Brad began his career at Ernst & Young in the Audit and Assurance Services practice. A Certified Public Accountant, Brad received his Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Washington.
Karen Freitag | Chief Revenue Officer
Karen is the Chief Revenue Officer at Aryaka and is responsible for all revenue-generating functions, including direct and indirect sales channels, account management teams, sales engineering and sales operations. She has nearly 20 years of experience driving growth in highly complex global sales organizations through developing innovative go-to-market strategies, creating operational efficiencies and building high performance teams with companies such as IBM, Siemens, Ericsson and Sprint.
Previously, she was Executive Vice President Worldwide Sales for Rivada Networks. Prior to Rivada, Freitag was President of Sprint’s Global Enterprise Business Unit where she led the company’s foray into Internet of Things, Wholesale, and SD-WAN.
Karen holds an MBA from Baker University and is an alumni of the Women’s Senior Leadership Program at Northwestern University—Kellogg School of Management.
Shashi Kiran | Chief Marketing Officer
Shashi Kiran is the Chief Marketing Officer at Aryaka Networks responsible for Aryaka’s global marketing, product management and technology partnerships. He brings over 20 years of experience in the hi-tech industry across marketing, product management, business development and partnerships.
Shashi is a former marketing leader at Cisco where he led worldwide product and solutions marketing teams for several multi-billion dollar portfolios spanning datacenter, cloud, security and enterprise networking. From 2011-13 he also led Cisco $15B+ combined switching portfolio. He was instrumental in launching the company’s SDN strategy and ramping up its application centric infrastructure (ACI) offering. Most recently Shashi was the CMO for Quali, a VC-backed firm focused on Cloud and DevOps automation.
Currently he serves on the advisory board of The Fabric – an early stage VC firm, 8VC-backed Ushur and Frontdesk.ai. Shashi is a frequent industry speaker, blogger and columnist to Forbes and Money Inc.
Shashi holds a degree in Electronics Engineering and an MBA in Marketing, both from India, with executive education stints at Harvard and Stanford universities. He is also a practicing CISSP.
Edward Frye | Chief Information Security Officer
Edward Frye is the Chief Information Security Office at Aryaka Networks responsible for the company wide company-wide leadership of Aryaka’s information security program and collaborating with the industry leaders to share best practices on information security.
Frye is an information security leader with over 20 years of experience establishing cross-functional, practical security approaches that fit company culture and business goals. Prior to joining Aryaka, Frye was head of security at Elementum SCM, Inc., where he was responsible for establishing an Information Security Management System (ISMS) and obtaining ISO/IEC 27001:2013 certification for the organization. Prior to Elementum, Edward built several information security programs for many SaaS companies, including BlueJeans, Valley Oak Systems, Ellie Mae and PaymentOne. He is currently a board member and president of the Silicon Valley chapter of the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA).
Edward holds a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology and a Master’s degree in Information Security and Assurance from Western Governors University.
Deepak Kumar | Chief Customer Officer
Deepak is a cloud and enterprise software industry veteran with over 20 years of experience. As Chief Customer Officer, his key focus is to enhance the quality and experience of Aryaka’s global customers and identify new solutions that will elevate enterprises to the next level of digital transformation.
Prior to joining Aryaka, Deepak was the Senior Vice President and General Manager at [24]7.ai, where he was responsible for building out strategic partnerships and alliances. He has also held management positions at Fractal Analytics and Aztec Software.
Deepak has an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India, with a Biomedical engineering degree from Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.
April January | Chief Of Staff
April January is the Chief Of Staff at Aryaka Networks. She is responsible for managing the project management office, executive goal setting, corporate social responsibility, company policies, process optimization, communications and a variety of other special projects.
Prior to joining Aryaka, April was in director level roles at early to mid-stage startups for 5 years. Most recently, she was Director of Automation Solutions at Catalytic, a process automation company. She also served 10 years at PricewaterhouseCoopers where she led the national launch of a new internal operations department.
April received a Bachelor’s degree in Accounting from the California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo. She is also a certified Project Management Professional (PMP).
Michelle Mitchell | Chief Human Resources Officer
Michelle brings over 20 years of human resources experience to her role as Aryaka’s Chief Human Resources Officer. Prior to joining Aryaka, she was Vice President, Human Resources at Yodlee, a publicly traded division of Envestnet, one of today’s largest providers of wealth management solutions to independent financial advisors. Before that, she was at Riverstone Networks where she served as Vice President of Human Resources prior to their acquisition by Lucent Technologies. Michelle received her Bachelor of Science in Sociology from Santa Clara University.
Vikas Garg | Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations
Vikas Garg is the Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations at Aryaka Networks. Vikas has more than 20 years of experience in Computer Networking with more than 10 years of design, development and management experience in the CDN industry. Previously, Vikas was the Vice President of Engineering at CDNetworks, heading their global research and development efforts. He was the Vice President of Engineering & Operations at Speedera Networks, prior to its acquisition by Akamai Technologies. At Speedera, Vikas helped to build one of the largest Content Delivery Networks in the industry. Before that, Vikas held senior engineering development and management roles at Wave Systems, Distinct Corporation, Microsoft, and Punjab Wireless Systems.
Vikas holds several patents in the area of Content Distribution Networks, Cloud Computing and Global Traffic Management.
Vikas holds dual graduate degrees, in Computer Sciences from the University of Wisconsin, and in Electrical Engineering from the University of Alabama. Vikas received his undergraduate degree in Electronics from Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, India.
Christiana Khostovan | General Counsel and Corporate Secretary
Christiana Khostovan is the General Counsel and Corporate Secretary at Aryaka. She oversees all legal and regulatory matters including corporate governance and securities, commercial transactions, employment, IP, privacy, and litigation. Christiana joined Aryaka from Revel Systems where she was General Counsel and Corporate Secretary and prior to that from Franklin Templeton Companies, LLC where she served as SVP and Chief Legal Officer supporting 150 entities in 42 countries for over 17 years. Christiana is admitted to The State Bar of California, The United States District Court for the Northern District of California, The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and has practiced before the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. She has also served on various corporate and charitable boards including Golden Gate University School of Law and Crystal Springs Uplands School.
