Converge, a Cambridge, MA and San Jose, CA-based venture capital firm, announced the addition of Anshu Agarwal as a General Partner to launch the firm’s Silicon Valley presence.
Led by Nilanjana Bhowmik and Maia Heymann, Converge invests principally in the bi-coastal tech centers of Boston, New York and Silicon Valley, and in select technology markets including Toronto and Israel in early stage B2B technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud and blockchain infrastructure and edge computing, and Robotics. The firm invests at the earliest stages of B2B company formation in Pre Seed, Seed and Series A rounds. Its portfolio includes Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform that raised a Series F round led by GIC valuing the company at $8.6B; BlueConic, a customer data platform majority acquired by Vista Equity Partners; and several other fast growth B2B tech companies including TrustCloud, RevenueBase and Amper.
Agarwal built four B2B startups as a founding member or early executive, exiting each to a publicly traded company, and leveraged that expertise and network to found her own startup as a CEO, selling it in under three years to a public company.
Agarwal co-founded Nimbella, leading the company as CEO from ideation to exit. Nimbella, a Converge portfolio company, pioneered serverless computing, and was acquired in 2021 by DigitalOcean. Post-acquisition, he served as the VP and GM of DigitalOcean’s Serverless & Kubernetes business unit, driving the product adoption to DigitalOcean’s more than 600,000 customers.
From 2000 to 2018, Agarwal was an executive or founding member of four Silicon Valley B2B startups: Speedera Networks, a content-delivery-network pioneer acquired in 2005 by Akamai, Ankeena, a high performance media delivery solution acquired in 2010 by Juniper Networks, ConteXtream, a software-defined-networking and network-function-virtualization pioneer acquired in 2015 by HP, and Cedexis, a cloud infrastructure provider acquired in 2018 by Citrix Systems.
Prior to embarking on her entrepreneurial journey, Agarwal was an AI researcher in speech at Motorola Research Labs and her graduate thesis was in neural networks for speech and image recognition.
FinSMEs
22/07/2023