Meet the Team

Anand has previously worked at Symantec and VMware, as a researcher and an engineer in the areas of security and networking. He has presented at Financial Cryptography and BlackHat conferences and has filed over 25 patents. Anand holds a Ph.D. from Stony Brook University and a Bachelor of Technology from IIT Kanpur, both in Computer Science.

Faiyaz Shahpurwala most recently led the charter for IBM Cloud Platform as VP/GM delivering a portfolio of enterprise cloud offerings. Prior to that he was SVP at Cisco Systems, responsible for building and running their Cloud Infrastructure and Managed Services Organization. He also spent 4 years in India leading Cisco’s globalization efforts in Bangalore and being responsible for the Advanced Services and Industry solutions business for Asia Pac and Emerging Markets. In 2001 he was part of a storage Networking Startup Andiamo Systems that was acquired by Cisco. He was the inventor and holds a patent for NatKit, a remote monitoring tool. He has held an advisory role for many startups (View, Platform 9, Truu.ai, Minjar).

Anand Balasubrahmanyan is a proven strategic financial leader for high-growth businesses. Prior to joining Fortanix, he was Head of Finance & Business Operations for VeloCloud Networks, where he was a key member of the executive team navigating through the inevitable ups and downs of hyper-growth in the enterprise infrastructure space, and led VeloCloud's $50M Series D fundraising and subsequent strategic sale to VMware. Prior to VMware/VeloCloud, Anand had a 20-year career as an investment banker and private equity investor at DLJ, Morgan Stanley, and The Carlyle Group. Anand holds Bachelors degrees from Wharton and the Engineering School at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Masters from Stanford's Graduate School of business

Shashi enjoys both the art and science of marketing. He is driven by his passion to build great teams that apply the right mix of marketing elements to take a company to the next level. Shashi has held executive roles at companies like Cisco and Nortel, leading global teams and overseeing marketing and product management for large multi-billion-dollar portfolios operating at scale. He has also held CMO roles at multi-stage startups focused on enterprise software, infrastructure, security and AI, working closely with the C-level leadership team and the Board of Directors. He also serves on the advisory board of innovative startups and accelerators as a way of giving back to the community. As the CMO of Fortanix, Shashi is responsible for all aspects of marketing, including elevating the brand and fueling the growth of the company as a leader in data security, confidential computing and AI.

Annamarie Dunn is the Chief People Officer at Fortanix. She has over 18 years of executive Human Resources experience and 20 years of high-tech marketing and communications experience. She was the VP of HR, Culture and Talent at Cadence, where she spent 8 years leading their culture and employer brand transformation resulting in Cadence being seen as an employer of choice and listed on the Fortune "100 Best Companies to Work For" list. Prior to Cadence, Annamarie worked at NetApp for 10 years holding various leadership roles in HR with a focus on culture, and helping them become #1 on the Fortune "100 Best" list. Annamarie is passionate about creating exceptional workplace cultures and environments that drive business success and where employees thrive. Annamarie has a J.D. from Santa Clara University School of Law and a B.A. from U.C. Santa Cruz. She is on the advisory board for NextGen Cyber Talent.

Ron is a senior executive with more than 20 years of experience at major publicly traded companies, as well as at early-stage, privately held companies. Prior to his role as Vice President of Worldwide Sales at VMware, Ron was the Vice President of Global Sales at VeloCloud, which was acquired by VMware in 2017. Prior to this, Ron was the vice president of America for OnMobile where he managed overall sales and operations. He arrived at OnMobile through the acquisition of Dilithium, where he served as the senior vice president of sales and marketing selling to Tier 1 worldwide service providers. Prior to Dilithium, Longo was CEO for venture-backed Red Condor and SVP for Mahi Networks, both of which were acquired. Before joining Mahi Networks, Ron was the worldwide vice president of marketing at Advanced Fibre Communication (AFC), which was acquired by Tellabs. Longo was recruited by AFC from Adtran, where he ran the company’s technical support and product qualification organization.

Gerry Sillars leads the Asia Pacific Region for Fortanix. Prior to his current role, Gerry ran the Asia Pacific Region for Skybox Security a leader in Vulnerability and Network Management, he has led businesses in the Asia Pacific Region for the last 20 years with CommVault Systems, Alcatel Lucent, and UpGuard. Gerry is a native of Scotland and an Australian citizen and resides in Singapore.

Having been with Fortanix from the beginning, Jethro is responsible for the overall design and security of the Fortanix architecture and products. Both in academia and industry, he's considered a pioneer in the confidential computing field, having published many papers, and filed several patents in the field of cloud computing security. Jethro holds a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Science from the University of Twente in the Netherlands.

Nick has a long history of start-up sales leadership. Prior to joining Fortanix Nick was in sales leadership roles at Corelight, Cohesity, Actifio, and 3PAR. Each of these companies grew in value more than 10x and several over 100x during his tenure. He has a passion for selling innovative products and finds nothing is more professionally rewarding than helping customers solve some of their toughest challenges in new and innovative ways.

John leads the Fortanix Product Management team, bringing extensive experience unlocking customer outcomes for enterprise workloads at global scale. After leading teams around developer experience (Speech SDK, Ads SDK) and workflow automation (Windows Workflow) for 14 years at Microsoft, John led the Product Advisory Council at ServiceNow, led the PM teams owning security, compliance and analytics for Cisco’s Collaboration Division (WebEx, Jabber, Teams), and led the Product & UX functions for Chef Software (Infrastructure as Code, Compliance as Code), completing a successful exit. John holds patents in multi-dimensional content delivery and information tagging.

Vishal is an entrepreneurial and engineering leader with over 25 years’ experience in leading, building and mentoring multi-cultural teams across United States, EMEA and APAC regions. Before joining Fortnaix, Vishal was VP of Cloud Engineering & Security Operations at Aktana, a leading provider of AI powered insights and suggestions for life science companies. Prior to Aktana, Vishal was at OpenText as Sr. Director of Cloud Engineering. He has worked at Oracle for 17 years with various roles managing Product development and operations team. Vishal holds MBA from Pepperdine University and Bachelor of Computer engineering from University of Evansville.

With an extensive background in complex systems engineering and the application of machine learning for data discovery, Richard leads the deployment of Fortanix Confidential Computing technology for customers. Richard has served as General Members’ Representative to the Governing Board, and Chair of the End-User Advisory Council, of the Confidential Computing Consortium of the Linux Foundation and he is recognized as a thought leader on applications of Confidential Computing. Richard holds a Doctor of Business Administration from Henley Business School at the University of Reading, has filed patents and published papers on the application of Confidential Computing technology, and is conducting research on the use of artificial intelligence (AI) systems within the context of national security.

Patrick was Fortanix’s original VP of Business Development where he led strategic alliances, cloud service providers and global system integrator business initiatives. In his new role, Patrick is excited to be leading Fortanix’s go-to-market strategy and execution in new solution areas including Confidential Computing, Blockchain and DeFi. He has been leading Silicon Valley startups in sales, marketing, BD and other C level roles over several decades, and has led exits at Dynamic Pictures (Nvidia), Cobalt Networks (Sun/Oracle), Topspin (Cisco) and most recently at Opsani (AppDynamics/ Cisco)

Connie leads the Legal function at Fortanix. Prior to joining Fortanix, Connie was VP, Legal at VeloCloud and joined VMware after VeloCloud's acquisition by VMware. Connie has over 20 years of legal experience supporting private and public companies in a variety of industries. She holds a J.D. from UC Hastings College of the Law and a Bachelor of Arts degree from UCLA.

General Partner at Foundation Capital

Krishna is a Founder and Managing Director, NeoTribe Ventures

Sunil is a Managing Director at Intel Capital driving early-venture and growth-equity investments in the Software and Security Sector across cloud infrastructure, big data, security, and next-generation enterprise applications. In addition to Fortanix, Sunil has held board or advisory roles at several leading companies including Ellie Mae (NYSE: ELLI), Sumo Logic, Snowflake Computing, XenSource (NASDAQ: CTXS), Splunk (NASDAQ: SPLK), and TeleNav (NASDAQ: TNAV).

Darren is co-head and chief investment officer of Growth Equity within Goldman Sachs Asset Management. The Growth Equity business manages a global portfolio of minority investments in high-growth technology companies. He is a member of the Growth Investment Committee and Firmwide Strategic Investing Committee. Darren first joined Goldman Sachs in 2000 as an executive director in Investment Research in London, covering the software and technology services sector until 2004. He rejoined the firm in 2007 in the Principal Strategic Investments business and led the firm's strategic investments in financial technology and enterprise software. Darren was named managing director in 2010 and partner in 2014. Darren earned a BA, summa cum laude, from Emory University.