AA

Arash Afrakhteh

Partner at Pear VC, formerly co-founder at Cariden Technologies

Menlo Park, California

Invests in

  • Min Investment:

    $250,000.00
  • Max Investment:

    $10,000,000.00
  • Target Investment:

    $5,000,000.00

Work Experience

2020

  • Partner

    2020

    Investing in AI, Modern Data Stacks, Developer tooling, Security and cloud. Enterprise & Infrastructure. Board Director at Orby AI, Causal Labs. Board observer at quadric.io

  • Visiting Partner

    2020 - 2020

    0 to 1 venture capital. We partner with entrepreneurs from day zero to build category-defining companies.

2016 - 2020

  • Executive Consultant to CEOs / Advisor / Angel Investor / Entrepreneur

    2016 - 2020

    Strategic business, technical and product consulting for software startups in Cloud networking, mapping, education, enterprise and green technologies. Launched projects in Environmental (patent pending), Mapping software and education. Companies: Teeb, Taygo, Blueword.ai, Map2door, Volta Networks Learning sabbatical through Stanford University and MIT classes in Machine Learning, Deep Learning (general, vision), Distributed and Parallel Systems, Design Thinking/ Product Design/ Design Execution/ Design Research

2012 - 2015

  • Head of Tech for WAN Infrastructure SDN

    2012 - 2015

    Following the acquisition of Cariden, I led the WAN infrastructure SDN development known as WAN Automation Engine (WAE) as chief architect and head of tech. WAE is part of Cisco Crosswork Network Automation suite of products and is a distributed controller with northbound REST / Thrift APIs, Southbound near real time collection, analytics and modeling and many Apps including Design, Live Analytics, Optimization, Traffic Engineering and Bandwidth on Demand.

  • CTO / Co-Founder / Board of Directors

    2011 - 2012

    Acquired by Cisco. Cariden was a profitable bootstrapped startup and leader in WAN infrastructure SDN and WAN Traffic Engineering and Planning. Cariden's respected MATE Suite of products was used by almost all Tier-1 Service providers, many web scale companies, Telcos and cable companies. Defined the technical direction of Cariden and its overall product architecture, primarily focusing on strategic products and technologies. Developed Cariden's SDN (Software Defined Networking) line of product called NS-OS, a clustered, almost linearly scalable and industry's first WAN Infrastructure SDN platform.

  • VP Engineering / Co-Founder / Board of Directors

    2001 - 2011

    Created and lead the Cariden's engineering team from company's inception to becoming the dominant provider of WAN network planning, simulation, analytics, optimization and traffic engineering tools (Cariden's MATE Suite). Co-designed and implemented many major components of MATE. Lead engineering through more than twenty releases.

2000 - 2001

  • Director of Engineering

    2000 - 2001

    Lead the engineering team and to development Panop’s online advertising recommendation system. Panop was acquired by Broadbase/Kana and I was designated one of the key employees.

1997 - 2000

  • Principal Engineer

    1997 - 2000

    Designed, and implemented a run time process execution environment to achieve fault tolerance and resiliency for all the Vertical’s services. Architected and implemented remote management system (C++ and Java)

1994 - 1997

  • Software Engineer

    1994 - 1997

    Implemented many components of the port of Newton OS's Object Oriented File System for Mac OS and Windows Platforms as well as other communication components for Newton Connection Kit. (C++)

1993 - 1994

  • Software Engineer

    1993 - 1994