RS

Rajesh Swaminathan

Partner, Khosla Ventures

San Francisco Bay Area

Work Experience

  • Partner

    2020

    Assisting entrepreneurs and managing investments across EV batteries, hydrogen, solar, grid storage, sustainable plastics, carbon capture, industrial chemicals, foodtech, healthcare – focusing on materials science driven innovations that have a large societal impact.

2009 - 2020

  • Head of Applied Ventures

    2018 - 2020

    Managed a portfolio of deeptech startups across 13 countries in over 85 companies. Invested in deep-tech/ hardware startups across Climatech (solar, batteries, windows ..), Semiconductors, AI, Life Sciences. Applied Ventures, LLC, is the venture capital arm of Applied Materials.

  • Investment Director

    2015 - 2018

  • Investment Manager

    2009 - 2015

  • Sr Associate

    2008 - 2009

    Investment focus in Cleantech and Semis. Key Investments: EnPhase energy, R2 Semiconductor

2007 - 2008

  • Consultant

    2007 - 2008

2007 - 2007

  • Investment Banking

    2007 - 2007

    IPO on Renesola, a solar wafer materials Co. M&A transactions in Cleantech

2001 - 2006

  • Lead - Emerging Technologies

    2001 - 2006

    Drove the technical assessment of several Optical, MEMS, RF device startups and established successful partnerships with many. Led the design for reliability program for Lucent’s 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s telecommunication systems and supported the successful deployment of these systems globally.