We are a Team
With a Common Goal

Lip-Bu is President and CEO of Cadence Design and Chairman of Walden International.

Dana Bennett is Chief People Officer at SambaNova. Dana has over 20 years of experience at global companies ranging from Udacity, Mozilla, Apple, eBay, E*TRADE, and Applied Materials.  Her experience spans all areas in the People team organization with a strong background in business partnering.

Rachel Birks leads the People Operations team that is scaling SambaNova Systems for growth, developing employees’ careers, and building and maintaining an open and inclusive culture. Prior to SambaNova, Rachel worked for Sauce Labs Inc., where she also managed all of Human Resources, Recruiting and Facilities.

Peter has more than 20 years of experience building new technology and taking it to market. At VMware, he was responsible for AI/ML Engineering on VMware’s core virtualization product. Prior to Bitfusion’s acquisition by VMware, Peter was its VP of Engineering, owning the Flexdirect Platform and leading Solution Architects, QA, and DevOps. Peter has contributed to groundbreaking technology that helped change the industry, driving the GPU Computing revolution through work on CUDA and supporting the Tesla Business Unit at NVIDIA. He has also held senior technical leadership positions at Sun Microsystems and Dell. Before Bitfusion, Peter was the CTO and VP of Engineering at Waypoint, building a SaaS solution for analytics and workflow targeted at the Commercial Real Estate market. Peter graduated from the Australian National University with a BSC (Hons), where he majored in Mathematics and Computer Science with a minor in Physics.

Beverley has over 20 years of experience as a senior accounting and finance executive, bringing a rich history of building and scaling accounting and finance teams across the globe within technology companies, especially in the hardware and semiconductor sectors. Prior to joining SambaNova Systems, she was VP, Corporate Controller and VP of Finance for JUST, Inc., a high-growth food technology startup. She is a Big Four-trained chartered accountant.

Jonathan brings over 20 years of experience in building high-growth technology companies to SambaNova Systems. He joins SambaNova after nearly nine years at Tesla, where he served in various leadership roles and most recently as General Counsel, leading the company’s legal, policy and regulatory teams. Jonathan earned his Juris Doctorate and Master of Business Administration from the University of Southern California, and holds a Bachelor of Science in mechanical engineering from the University of California at Berkeley.

Marshall has overseen the go-to-market of dozens of industry leading enterprise hardware and software products. Previously, he was Vice President of Systems Product Management and Solutions Development at Oracle.

Sumti has led more than 10 enterprise class processors in the area of Architecture, Software, Performance, Verification and Productization.

Richard has a wealth of experience working in the US and UK in startups, the public sector, and large technology companies including Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Cisco. He was the founding Policy & Research Director of Nesta (the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology & the Arts) and was the founding Chief Executive of Boxmind, the Oxford-based educational content, software, and services company.

Poonacha Kongetira’s background lies in building first-of-its-kind chips to solve problems at scale. He specializes in providing engineering leadership for accelerators, processors, ASICs, and systems and developing team capability to deliver sustained excellence. In the past, Poonacha led the growth of Nvidia’s Bangalore design center for mobile and GPU chips to 800+ engineers and also spent over a dozen years building CPUs at Sun Microsystems. Before joining SambaNova, Poonacha led a Hardware team at Google, focusing on developing custom silicon accelerators for data centers.

Penny has over 27 years of experience in EDA tools and microprocessor designs. Previously she has held positions at IBM, ISS, Avanti, Raza Foundries, Afara Websystems, Sun, and Oracle.

Geoff previously served as CFO for a number of high tech companies including Cadence Design Systems, Matrix Semiconductor, Inc., NVIDIA Corporation, SiRF Technology, Inc. and Telegent Systems. He was also formerly VP and corporate controller at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD).

Achin is Chief Technology Officer and Executive Vice President of Engineering for Starkey Hearing Technologies. He previously held the position of Vice President and General Manager of Intel’s Perceptual Computing Group.

Navin Chaddha is Managing Director at Mayfield. He has been named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, has ranked on the Forbes Midas List of Global Tech Investors eleven times, and appeared on the New York Times/CB Insights list of top investors four times. During his venture capital career, Navin has invested in over 50 companies, of which 17 have gone public and 18 have been acquired. Some of his current investments include Fungible, Hashicorp, Lyft, and Poshmark. As an entrepreneur, Navin has co-founded or led three startups including VXtreme, a streaming media platform, acquired by Microsoft to become Windows Media.

Sunil is a global executive who has led and scaled businesses across high technology, banking, and consulting. He is an avid investor and counselor to various startups in the ML/AI space. Sunil was the CEO of OakNorth. He led the company through a period of extensive growth globally bringing on board some of the world’s most sophisticated financial services companies while deepening the product offering. Prior to OakNorth, Sunil was a VP at Google for 12 years, leading several initiatives, ultimately being responsible for the global talent acquisition organization. His prior experiences include leading Barclays Capital in Asia as their Chief Operating Officer for the Technology group. Sunil has a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Engineering from the University of Wollongong in Australia and an MBA from APESMA Sydney.

Amy serves on the board of directors for Procter & Gamble, and has previously served on the boards of Cisco, Splunk and Informatica, which encompass over a half trillion dollars in total market cap. Post-acquisition of her startup Accompany by Cisco for $270M, she led Cisco’s multi-billion dollar Collaboration business. As EVP and GM of this 6000 person team, she led the videoconferencing, cloud calling, contact center, video device and phones businesses.

Prior to Accompany, Amy was at Google, where she led the teams for Google Analytics, Website Optimizer, Trends, and multichannel attribution for over 7 years, growing Google Analytics to serve over 86% of the entire web. She previously led product for the paid search and affiliates channels at eBay, as well as worked in the semiconductor and software industries at McKinsey. She started her career in hardware with Intel, AMD and Motorola.

Eli is the former Chief Technologist and Vice President from Cloudera, which develops a modern platform for machine learning and analytics.

Christopher De Sa is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University.  He is an expert in machine learning and researches algorithms and systems for high-performance training.

Colonel (Ret.) Doug Drakeley is the Chief Coach at Always Be Leadership. In 2021, he retired from the Air Force, where he led the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center’s (JAIC) industry outreach effort from Silicon Valley and was the JAIC’s link to the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) at Moffett Federal Field in Mountain View. In this role, Doug worked with Artificial Intelligence (AI) companies to facilitate their partnership with the Department of Defense (DoD) and accelerate the adoption of AI across the DoD. Doug has held numerous leadership positions during his career, including the Director of Intelligence for Air Force Reserve Command (AFRC) and commander of the first-ever Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) Group in AFRC, where he grew this team from 38 people to over 1,000 personnel in just two years. Doug also spent 15 years in senior leadership roles at numerous commercial companies focused on sales, marketing and customer satisfaction. His industry experience includes manufacturing, telecommunications, broadband, financial services and technology firms. Finally, Doug is a doctoral candidate in Organizational Leadership at Wright State University.

Dr. Edward H. Frank is co-founder and CEO of Brilliant Lime, Inc and a member of the Board of Directors at several companies, including Analog Devices and Marvell. Dr. Frank has over 30 years of experience in key roles at companies including Apple, Broadcom, and Sun Microsystems, as well as companies he has co-founded.

Nicolas is a Partner at Redline Capital. Prior to Redline, Nicolas advised technology companies on M&As and IPOs at Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch and held engineering positions at Corvis and Alcatel-Lucent. He holds degrees from MIT and ENSTB.

As CEO + Founder of Hunt & Gather, a marketing and communications agency that advises startup ventures, revives the strategic communications efforts of established brands and applies discreet influencer relations to pair people and places. Jolie is known for her profile-raising counsel to executives and companies alike. She has held executive positions at AOL, Thomson Reuters, IBM and the Financial Times and serves on the board of Kilroy Realty (NYSE: KRC), where she chairs the CSR + Sustainability Committee (ESG). She is based in New York with her husband and two young children.

Former Salesforce President & CFO Emeritus, Tech Veteran (Salesforce, Autodesk, Logitech, Dell and HP), Strategic Advisor and member of the Board of Directors of Workday, Toast, Cloudflare and Secureworks and private companies. Mr. Hawkins holds a B.A. from Michigan State University, an M.B.A from the University of Colorado, and also completed the Advanced Management Program at Harvard Business School.

Greg holds 50 U.S. patents and has 37 years of experience as an architect and chip designer, having worked for IBM, Cyrix, Intel, Sun, Oracle, and two startups including SambaNova.

Tony Kim, Managing Director, is a member of the Fundamental Active Equity division of BlackRock’s Active Equities Group. Tony is a portfolio manager and sector head for the technology vertical and runs the Global Technology funds.

Christos is Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Stanford University, where he leads the multi-scale architecture & systems team (MAST).

Brian is Founder and Managing Partner of Atlantic Bridge Capital, a Global Growth Technology fund with over $1B under management. He is also Founder of Summit Bridge Capital, a joint venture China fund based in Beijing and Palo Alto. Prior to Atlantic Bridge, Brian was Founder and CEO of CEVA plc and led its IPO in 2000 (Nasdaq: CEVA). Brian was also Founder and Chairman of GloNav Inc., a fabless semiconductor company which developed the first single chip GPS solution for Galaxy Mobile phones (acquired by NXP).

Bill is a Partner at Walden International. He is a former EMC Fellow, CEO and President of DSSD, Inc. and Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Bill joined SambaNova as an advisor in 2022. Bill has 30 years of technology go-to-market experience, including 15 years as a Chief Revenue Officer and Section 16 Officer of Symantec, Nuance and Mandiant (formerly FireEye).

Tiark is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. He is an expert on programming languages and compilers. He has 20 years of experience leading commercial and open source software projects, has co-founded two startups, and was a member of the team that developed the Scala programming language.

Young Sohn is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, passionate about building businesses and excited about emerging technologies that have a positive impact to transform lives. Young currently serves as Corporate President and Chief Strategy Officer of Samsung Electronics and Chairman of the Board of HARMAN. He leads Samsung’s strategy for global innovation, investment, and new business creation, and led the company’s $8 billion acquisition of HARMAN.