Sridhar Gunapu Founder & CEO

Sridhar Gunapu is an innovative product engineering leader and entrepreneur with a track record of delivering enterprise-grade solution across a broad spectrum of industries. Using agile customer experience driven engineering methodologies he has designed and built products that meld customer journeys, UX and computer science to deliver products that solve problems in innovative ways.

He was an Architect for the world’s first web-based insurance marketplace, InsWeb corp, where he built dynamic UI frameworks (Patent US7707505) and scalable underwriting engines for automobile and life insurance markets (Patent US09521005).  He then went on to be a Partner and VP Engineering at EffOne Software Inc, where he built high throughput trading engines and solutions for major wall street firms, large-scale billing systems and smart meter architectures for utilities, catalogue management and micropayment platforms for e-commerce firms.

He has extensive experience in business process automation area has innovated in key RPA technologies (5 Patents) as an Executive & VP Engineering at Automation Anywhere, a leading RPA vendor. During his tenure at Automation Anywhere, he led product transformation of its testing and client-server based automation product into its enterprise-grade modern product offering keeping pace with market dynamics and scaling the engineering team from 20 offshore developers to over 120 with teams in San Jose, India and Ukraine. He also conceived and led the development of BotFarm, a scalable on-demand bot platform and IQBot, an intelligent bot framework for processing documents.

Dorea El-Sayed CFO

Starting at PwC as an auditor, where she became a Certified Public Account, Dorea returned to UCLA to obtain her MBA from the UCLA Anderson School and is currently an active Certified Public Accountant and member of the AICPA.

Her technology career started as a financial analyst for Oracle, where she was responsible for budgeting across hundreds of departments in 90 countries, Dorea also prepared quarterly results analysis for the executive committee. She worked cross functionally on software implementations, testing Oracle’s financial products, leading a growing team of finance professionals.

Now, with over 20 years’ financial consulting experience, Dorea has been instrumental in the successful growth of numerous start-up ventures across a wide variety of industries including software, hardware, SaaS, and medical device companies. Her financial experience includes debt and equity financing, financial modeling, cash management, fundraising, mergers and acquisitions, Board of Directors’ presentations, strategic planning, systems improvement and cost analysis. Dorea has established subsidiaries in multiple countries and overseen operations and compliance with foreign regulations and has also managed the HR, administrative and legal functions for several start-ups.

Sandy Thielamay VP Sales

Sandy brings more than 20 years of high-tech industry experience to his new role. Most recently, he has served as a commercial leader leading critical positioning, go-to-market strategy, sales generation, marketing, and management. Previously, he served in various sales and leadership roles at Automation Anywhere, Infomart Datacenters and IPsoft. In his new role, he will focus on expanding the adoption of Decision Engines’ signature product.

He is an adaptive business leader in the automation industry, and he has helped boost double-digit revenue growth for Fortune 100 & 500 companies. In his lucrative career as a Digital Transformation thought leader, Thielamay clearly expresses his expertise in AI Automation and brings vision, successful strategies and solutions to every company he touches.

T.M. Ravi Managing Director, The Hive

T. M. Ravi is Managing Director and Co-Founder of The Hive that works with entrepreneurs to help create businesses and that leverage data. Ravi has a successful track record as a serial entrepreneur and operational executive.

Most recently, Ravi was Chief Marketing Officer for Iron Mountain, a provider of information management services. Ravi joined Iron Mountain through the acquisition of Mimosa Systems, the leader in enterprise content archiving, where he was founder and chief executive officer. Previously, Ravi was vice president of marketing at Computer Associates (CA), where he was responsible for the core line of enterprise management products, including CA Unicenter as well as the areas of application, systems and network management, software distribution, help desk, security, and storage management.

Ravi joined CA through the $1.2 billion acquisition of Cheyenne Software, the market leader in backup solutions. At Cheyenne Software, he was the vice president of the company’s successful Windows NT business with products including ARCserve backup and InocuLAN antivirus. Prior to Cheyenne, Ravi founded and was chief executive officer of Media Blitz, a provider of Windows NT storage solutions that was acquired by Cheyenne Software.

Gary Gauba Chief Executive Officer, Centurylink

Gary is Chief Enterprise Relationship Officer at Centurylink, the second largest US communications provider to global enterprise customers, carrying over 40% of the world’s internet traffic and a major global player in cyber defense. With the recent trends in Deep Tech, differentiated and hard to reproduce technology, CenturyLink has a big focus around leveraging our vast network-level data and advanced AI technologies, such as deep learning, to find hidden cybersecurity threats. In addition, CenturyLink is well positioned to be the go to provider for IoT. The company is investing heavily into the space providing services for our customers empowering them to monetize their data as a strategic asset. One of Gary’s key goals for 2017 and beyond is to create a safer, more connected world and help increase life expectancy through the power of big data, AI, and advanced analytics.

In the past two decades, Gauba, boot strapped, self-funded and successfully exited three companies: Cognilytics, Systech, and Softline. Cognilytics was one of the first companies globally to focus its whole strategy around big data, machine learning, and AI – now these terms are a part of our daily vocabulary. Prior, Entrepreneur Magazine in 1997 ranked Softline as the second fastest growing company in the U.S.A. – acquired by KPMG.

Zico Kolter Assistant Professor

Zico Kolter is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, with appointments in the Computer Science Department, the Institute for Software Research (in the Societal Computing program), and affiliated appointments with the Machine Learning Department, the Robotics Institute, and the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. His work focuses on machine learning and optimization, with a specific focus on applications in smart energy systems.

From an algorithmic standpoint, he has worked on fast optimization algorithms for a number of problems and for general convex programs, large-scale probabilistic modeling, stochastic optimization, and deep learning. On the application side, he has worked on energy disaggregation, probabilistic forecasting for energy systems, and model predictive control techniques for industrial control in the electrical grid.

Dr. Steve Garnett Advisor

Steve Garnett has had one of the most distinguished careers of any European executive in the software industry. In the 2009 Daily Telegraph poll Steve was named as one of the 50 most influential Britons in Technology. He was at Oracle Corporation for 12 years as the company grew to become the world’s second largest software company. He joined Siebel Systems in 1996 as Vice President of Europe and a member of the founders circle. In eight years the company grew to become the world’s fifth largest software company with 8,000 employees and a $60 billion market capitalization at its peak. In 2003 Steve joined his former Oracle executive colleague Marc Benioff to head Europe operations and be part of the executive team at salesforce.com. He helped take salesforce.com public in 2004 and it now stands with a market capitalization of $19.51 billion.

Jim Steele Advisor

Jim Steele serves as Yext’s Chief Revenue Officer and President. Previously he served as President and Chief Revenue Officer of InsideSales.com, the industry’s first AI-powered predictive sales acceleration platform. Prior to joining InsideSales, Steele served at Salesforce for 12 years as Chief Customer Officer and President of Worldwide Sales and Operations where he helped grow the company from $25 million to more than $5 billion in revenue. Steele brings more than 35 years of business experience with some of the B2B tech sector’s biggest players, including Ariba and IBM.
Steele holds a B.S. in Civil Engineering from Bucknell University.

Anil Doradla Chief Financial Officer, Airgain

Mr. Doradla has served as Airgain’s chief financial officer since February 2018. Mr. Doradla joins Airgain with over 20 years of experience in the finance and technology industry. Prior to Airgain, he served as an Equity Research Analyst at William Blair & Company where he covered a variety of companies in the technology space. He also previously worked with the equity research groups at Deutsche Bank and Caris & Company. Prior to working on Wall Street, he held a variety of strategic and engineering roles at SBC Labs and LCC International, Inc. Mr. Doradla holds a Master of Science in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Tech and a Master of Business Administration from the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas at Austin.