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Leadership

Leadership

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Partha Seetala

Founder and CEO

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Simone Sassoli

Chief Customer Officer
& VP of EMEA Sales

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Brad Mendel, Vice President Sales Western Region, Robin.io

Brad Mandell

Vice President of Global Sales

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Mehran-Hadipour

Mehran Hadipour

Vice President of Business Development and Tech Alliances

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Fernando Cerioni

Vice President of
Product Management

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David Reeder

Vice President of
Service Provider Sales

Board

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Don Listwin

iSchemaView
Board Member

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Rajeev Madhavan

Clear Ventures
Chairman

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Partha Seetala

Founder and CEO

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Steve Schlenker

DN Capital
Board Member

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Francisco (Paco) Rivera

USAA
Board Member

Advisors

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Ben Verghese

VP of Engineering
Illumio

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Fred van den Bosch

Investor
Former CEO
Librato

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Steve Papa

Founder and CEO
Parallel Wireless

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Premal Buch

VP and GM of Custom Logic FPGA Engineering, Data Platforms Group
Intel Corporation

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Arpit Joshipura

GM Networking + Edge/IoT
Linux Foundation

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Ira Goldfarb

Former VP of Global Sales Specialists, SP Products
Cisco

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Dipty Desai

Head of West Coast Division
USISPF

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Jai Menon

Chief Scientist
Fungible, Inc.

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Chet Kapoor

Chairman and CEO
DataStax

Investors

Partha Seetala

Founder and CEO

Partha Seetala is the Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Robin.io. With more than 20 years of technology and product vision and expertise, he has taken multiple fully-featured products from concept to market. He has conceived, designed and built products in Scale-out distributed storage, File Systems, Networking, Distributed Systems, Big Data, and Information Analytics and Containers/Kubernetes space.

Previously he was a Distinguished Engineer at Symantec’s information and storage management business, known as Veritas. In that capacity, he conceived, architected and led engineering teams to take multiple products from concept to market. He was also an adviser on multimillion-dollar product lines including NetBackup, Cluster File System, Veritas Cluster Server, and Information Fabric. He holds a master’s degree in Computer Science and Engineering from the University of Minnesota.

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Simone Sassoli

Chief Customer Officer & VP of EMEA Sales

Simone Sassoli leads the Customer Success organization at Robin.io. He is responsible for go-to-market and support activities that help customers solve fundamental deployment challenges for Big Data, Databases, Search and Indexing, and AI/ML applications.

As a senior executive with over 20 years of experience in general management, sales and marketing, engineering, operations and customer support, Sassoli has a proven track record in the delivery of complex software solutions. He has built global high performance teams focused on customer success for Telco, Cable, Media & Entertainment and enterprise video markets worldwide.

Sassoli has joined Robin.io from Cisco where he led the global product strategy and management efforts for the Cisco SPVSS business unit. His responsibilities included service delivery and cloud platform engineering teams for SaaS and managed video services. Prior to Cisco, he was an executive at RGB Networks responsible for Strategy and Product Management, leading the company to a transformation from hardware to software solutions and cloud SaaS offerings. While at SeaChange International, he held a variety of management positions over a span of 11 years, culminating with the role of Vice President, In-Home Products. Prior to SeaChange, Sassoli spent five years at General Instrument where he served as a lead project engineer and product line and marketing manager.

Sassoli holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Drexel University and an Executive Master in Management of Technology from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

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Brad Mandell

Vice President of Global Sales

Brad brings more than 25+ years of sales management experience to his new position as VP of Sales West at Robin.io. Prior to joining Robin Brad was Chief Revenue Officer at Console Connect, a SaaS Carrier interconnect solution provider.  Brad was COO at Yagna Iq, a leader in sales acceleration SaaS solutions. At MapR Technologies, a leader in Big Data Hadoop, as VP of Worldwide Field Operations he built the initial sales team and helped take the company from untested startup to an acknowledged market leader. Brad has also worked at Cisco as the Global Director for Security, focusing on business transformation and new security company acquisitions. At Peribit Brad was VP of Sales for the Americas and Japan until the company’s acquisition by Juniper, where Brad, as part of the acquisition, was responsible for leading the emerging technology sales team, a critical element of our growth plan.    

Brad holds a BSC in Finance and Management from the University of Santa Clara, as well as certificates from the Executive Leadership programs at Harvard and Wharton.

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Mehran Hadipour

Vice President of Business Development and Tech Alliances

Mehran leads alliances at Robin and is responsible for Robin’s industry Partnerships and Alliance strategy. A respected industry veteran, who is passionate about driving business success through alliances and win-win partnerships, Mehran brings to the table years of experience in executing and driving change at major infrastructure and Enterprise software players such as EMC and IBM as well as at several Silicon Valley-based startups and high technology firms.

Prior to joining Robin, Mehran was Director of Global Business Development at Boston-based Zerto Inc, an enterprise level IT Resiliency Platform. Before that, Mehran was Director of Sales at EMC and Director of Business Development at Kashya. He holds an MSCE degree from Syracuse University and an MBA.

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Fernando Cerioni

Vice President of Product Management

Fernando has more than 20 years of experience in IT & Telecom with market leading companies, including Cisco Systems, Starent Networks, Motorola, Affirmed Networks and Parallel Wireless, being exposed to both VC-backed startups as well as established big companies.

He joins Robin from Parallel Wireless where he led the Product Management team for the company’s virtualized RAN solutions. Throughout his career, Fernando held Product Strategy, Product Management, Business Development and Marketing roles for Cable Access, Voice over IP, Mobile Networks Packet Core and RAN / OpenRAN. He worked with global Tier 1 carriers on their network strategies and deployments. Fernando has an MBA from Babson College and MSEE from ITBA Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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David Reeder

Vice President of Service Provider Sales

David Reeder leads Service Provider Sales at Robin. David has 25+ years of experience selling into the wireless communications industry focusing on new, innovative technologies. David has helped many of the top mobile operators around the world leverage state-of-the-art solutions.

Prior to joining Robin, David was Vice President Global Sales, Marketing & Business Development for Accuris Networks, a leading provider of Wi-Fi Offload, Roaming, Calling and IoT Interworking solutions. Additionally, he has held Senior Management roles with Wireless Radio Infrastructure, IoT and mobile operator companies. David has served as an Industry expert to the FCC’s Wireless Broadband Forum, co-chaired several Industry groups and currently serves as an Entrepreneurial Mentor to the University of Colorado Boulder’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship program. He holds a B.A. in Economics and a M.S. in Telecommunications from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Don Listwin

Board Member

Don Listwin is chairman of Calix, a provider of innovative access systems, and of Teradici, a leader in the creation of virtual workspaces. He previously served as an executive vice president at Cisco Systems, where he spent 10 years. Listwin’s career also includes serving as CEO of Sana Security and CEO of Openwave. He has served as board member and adviser to numerous companies, and presently serves on the boards of D-Wave Systems, PLUMgrid and Violin Memory, and is an adviser to the Canadian development bank BDC and to cyber security company Bugcrowd. In 2004 he founded the Canary Foundation, dedicated to the early detection of cancer, and he is also a consulting professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

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Rajeev Madhavan

Chairman

Rajeev Madhavan is a serial entrepreneur and investor. He is perhaps best known as the founder of software company Magma Design Automation, where he served as chairman and chief executive officer from its founding in 1997 through its acquisition by Synopsys in 2012. He also co-founded software companies LogicVision (acquired by Mentor Graphics) and Ambit Design Systems (acquired by Cadence Design Systems). Red Herring magazine named Madhavan to its “Top Innovators” list in 2002. Madhavan makes angel and venture investments in start-up companies competing in a range of industries, including data science and machine learning, mobile technology and social media.

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Steve Schlenker

Board Member

Steve Schlenker co-founded DN Capital in June 2000 and is currently Managing Partner based in the Sand Hill Road office, running DN Capital’s US operations. Schlenker began his career in venture capital and private equity in 1990. His investment experience has been in software and software related businesses. His sectors of focus include enterprise software, and to a lesser extent business on-line marketplaces and consumer mobile services. Among his select investments are Apsalar, ClusterHQ, Datanomic (acquired by Oracle), Endeca (acquired by Oracle), Familybuilder (acquired by Intelius), Geckoboard, Lagan/Kana (acquired by Verint), Ombud, Peak, Shiphawk, Recarga, and Robin Systems.

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Francisco (Paco) Rivera

Board Member

Paco Rivera is Assistant Vice President, Corporate Development. He executes and oversees venture capital investments in support of USAA Bank and enterprise efforts and leads due diligence for acquisitions and divestitures. Paco currently serves as a Board Member for Narrative Science and Robin and as a Board observer for BillGO and ID.me. He previously served as Board observer for MindMeld (acquired by Cisco) and ObserveIT (acquired by Proofpoint) where USAA realized successful exits.

Paco has led financial planning and analysis teams in Corporate Finance and USAA Bank since joining in 2011. He previously held corporate finance and strategy roles at Verizon, Merck & Co., Banco Popular de Puerto Rico and Bank of America. Key efforts include support for the 2011 Terremark ($1.4B) and 2007 Cybertrust ($450M) acquisitions, and for the launch of the Verizon Digital Media Services business unit. Paco began his career as an analyst covering Telecommunications for Banc of America Securities LLC. He held the Series 7 and 63 licenses.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in Finance from the University of Puerto Rico and an MBA from the Stephen M. Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan.

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Ben Verghese

As vice president of Engineering, Ben leads the team that delivers Illumio’s products. Prior to Illumio, Ben was vice president of Engineering and chief management architect at VMware. During his 13-year tenure at VMware, he was part of the ESX Server product founding team, led and delivered the VirtualCenter product from its inception, and led a number of the company’s strategic engineering initiatives.

In his career, Ben has spanned product development and research in networking, operating systems, and computer architecture at HP, Apollo Computers, DEC Research, and Compaq. Ben has a BS from IIT Madras, an MS from Cornell University, and a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University.

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Fred van den Bosch

Fred is a private investor and business consultant. Previously he served as the CEO of Librato, Inc., as CEO of PANTA Systems, Inc., as Executive Vice President Engineering, CTO and Director at VERITAS Software, Inc, and in various engineering and management positions at the Computer Systems Division of Philips Electronics. Fred serves as a director of Varonis, Reposify, and Trailze, and as an advisor to Today Ventures, Ultimaker, OSNexus, Robin Systems, Codota Dot Com, Thehintbox! and RepliXio.
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Steve Papa

Steve Papa is founder and CEO of Parallel Wireless.

Previously, Papa founded Endeca in 1999 and served as CEO through the company’s $1.1 billion acquisition by Oracle in 2011. Under Papa’s leadership, Endeca achieved $750 million in cumulative worldwide revenue and pioneered Guided Navigation, one of the leading search innovations of the decade and now an industry standard. Prior to founding Endeca, Papa was part of the original Akamai team and an early member of the Inktomi team. Papa is a Board Partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

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Premal Buch

Dr. Premal Buch is vice president and general manager of Custom Logic FPGA Engineering in the Data Platforms group at Intel Corporation. Buch’s team is responsible for the architecture and implementation of Intel’s FPGA fabric, chiplets, and product portfolio.

Buch joined Intel in 2019 from Robin.io. As the CEO of Robin, he built the company, team, and product from seed stage thru Series-B to become a recognized leader in storage and data management for containers and Kubernetes.

Prior to Robin, Buch was the Vice President of Software Engineering at Altera, responsible for all its FPGA design tools. Under his tenure, Altera overhauled its Quartus-II tool suite, leading to the first release of Quartus Prime Pro and Fast Forward Compile, the first OpenCL compiler in the industry for FPGA based hardware acceleration and Altera’s first ARM-based embedded developer tool suite.

Buch started his career at EDA software provider Magma Design Automation, joining it at its inception as engineer #2 and growing with the company to serve as a member of the executive team. As the Corporate Vice President and GM of Magma’s Design Implementation Business Unit, Buch was responsible for all aspects of the RTL-to-GDSII products that fueled Magma’s IPO and led to Magma becoming the fourth largest EDA company in the world.

Buch holds a bachelor’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering from BITS Pilani and a masters and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer sciences from the University of California, Berkeley.

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Arpit Joshipura

Arpit Joshipura is an executive leader and open source software evangelist across carriers, cloud and enterprise IT – spanning technology areas like networking, orchestration, operating systems, security, AI, edge, hardware and silicon. He was voted “Top 5 Movers and Shakers” in the Telecom Industry. At the Linux Foundation, Arpit leads open source projects in Networking (ONAP, OPNFV, ODL, FDIO, OvS, DPDK, OpenSwitch, DENT and others) as well as Edge/IOT (Akraino, EdgeX, EVE and others). As an industry thought leader, he is driving major disruptions including 5G, Edge, AI, Cloud Native (VNFs to CNFs). Arpit brings 30 years of networking expertise and vision to The Linux Foundation, with both technical depth and business breadth across IP, broadband, optical, mobile, routing, switching, L4-7, cloud, disaggregation, SDN/NFV, Cloud Native, open networking, and has been an early evangelist for open source. Arpit has served in CMO/CTO, VP, and Engineering leadership roles within both startups and larger enterprises.

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Ira Goldfarb

Ira was Vice President of Global Sales Specialists, Service Provider Products at Cisco until December 2019. His team was responsible for orchestrating a Global consistent Go-to-Market strategy for the Service Provider Products which included Routing, Optical, Cable Access, network automation and 5G Mobility.

Ira joined Cisco in September 2014 first as Vice President, Global Solutions Services and Custom Engineering for the Service Provider Video Software and Solutions business entity leading a team of 600 services professionals and 700 software engineers. Following that role, Ira was Vice President of Business Development and Commercial Planning for the Service Provider Business Unit where he created a Go-To-Market team that standardized the global go-to-market for all products and solutions between the Business Unit, Cisco Partners and the Sales teams. Ira also served as the Ericsson Alliance General Manager managing the Business Unit’s strategic relationship with Ericsson and Cisco.

Prior to Cisco Ira has over 35 years of experience in the technology marketplace. Ira has held senior leadership roles at two publicly traded companies, as Senior Vice President, Global Sales and Services for Envivio and Executive Vice President, Worldwide Sales and Services for SeaChange International.

Ira started his career at Digital Equipment where he held several Sales and National Account Management positions. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from Clark University and a Master of Business Administration from Boston University.

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Dipty Desai

Dipty is the Head of West Coast Division of USISPF where she works with the US and Indian Government, Enterprises/MNCs and Late Stage Startups supporting their needs for Policy Advocacy, State Engagements and Business to Business interactions for cross border growth across sectors including Healthcare.

She was the co-founder and CEO of FalconX, a leading startup engine and investment vehicle focused on building, growing and scaling technology-driven startups. Dipty was Senior Director of Operations and Business Development at TiE Silicon Valley where she helped create programs focused on inspiring, educating, mentoring, incubating, funding and connecting the entrepreneurs. She is the co-chair of TiE Global Health and TiEcon Healthcare Track and heads AI ML Healthcare for Pluto7. She is an advisor for healthcare startups and has contributed to due diligence, screening and curating of entrepreneurial ideas for pitch presentations and venture investments.

With strong science and business expertise she has been responsible for industry research, company analysis, business development, and thought leadership, which has helped position Dipty at the forefront of disruptions in the tech industry.

Dipty carried out her doctoral work on cancer research at the UCSF Med Center and her post-doctoral research in human genomics at Stanford University. She has worked for NASA, Roche and Hoechst in addition to a few startups. Her scientific expertise and peer-reviewed publications are in the fields of biochemistry, molecular biology, genomics and cancer research. Her passion for innovation and entrepreneurship and solving problems that impact the world has led her to work with entrepreneurs at the cutting edge of science and technology.

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Jai Menon

Jai is the Chief Scientist at Fungible, which he joined after having served as CTO for multi-billion dollar Systems businesses at both IBM and Dell.

Jai was an IBM Fellow, IBM’s highest technical honor, and one of the early pioneers who helped create the technology behind what is now a $20B RAID industry. He impacted every significant IBM RAID product between 1990 & 2010, and he co-invented one of the earliest RAID-6 codes in the industry called EVENODD. He was also the leader of the team that created the industry’s first, and still the most successful, storage virtualization product.

When he left IBM, Jai was Chief Technology Officer for Systems Group, responsible for guiding 15,000 developers. In 2012, he joined Dell as VP and CTO for Dell Enterprise Solutions Group. In 2013, he became Head of Research and Chief Research Officer for Dell.

Jai holds 53 patents, has published 82 papers, and is a contributing author to three books on database and storage systems. He is an IEEE Fellow and an IBM Master Inventor, a Distinguished Alumnus of both Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and Ohio State University, and a recipient of the IEEE Wallace McDowell Award and the IEEE Reynold B. Johnson Information Systems Award. He serves on several university, customer and company advisory boards.

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Chet Kapoor

Chet Kapoor is Chairman and CEO of DataStax. He is a proven leader and innovator in the tech
industry with more than 20 years in leadership at innovative software and cloud companies,
including Google, IBM, BEA Systems, WebMethods and NeXT. As Chairman and CEO of
Apigee, he led company-wide initiatives to build Apigee into a leading technology provider for
digital business. Google (Apigee) is the cross-cloud API management platform that operates in
a multi- and hybrid-cloud world. Chet successfully took Apigee public before the company was
acquired by Google in 2016. Chet earned his B.S. in engineering from Arizona State University

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