Rise Up to Protect Against the Global Cybercrime Syndicate

Naveen Bisht is Founder and CEO of Akitra Inc - an AI-powered, cloud-based compliance automation and cybersecurity solutions company and is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led numerous companies in the security and network infrastructure industries. He was the founder or co-founder and CEO of Straks, SecurAct, Nayna Networks, and Ukiah Software (acquired by Novell). He is the past Chair, Programs and a Board Member of TiE Silicon Valley and also, Chair of highly successful TiE Silicon Valley My Story Program that he started in 2011. He pursued PhD studies at University of California, Santa Barbara, and holds an MS from Texas Tech and BS/MS degrees from the Birla Institute of Technology & Science. He holds six patents in the areas of artificial intelligence, security and networking and has published several papers and articles on entrepreneurship and industry trends.

Ken Elefant joined Sorenson Ventures in 2017 and leads the firm’s early-stage technology practice. Prior to Sorenson Ventures, Ken spent more than 18 years in Silicon Valley at leading venture capital firms including Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. In addition, Ken has over 6 years in operational roles at technology companies. Ken enjoys working closely with entrepreneurs to help them attack new market opportunities and gain access to key initial customers and partners. His efforts have led to recognition as one of the most connected names in tech. At Sorenson, Ken has invested in Bridgecrew (Palo Alto Networks), CloudKnox (Microsoft), Openpath (Motorola Solutions), Octarine (VMWare), Kenna Security (Cisco), CyCognito, Talon Security, Qualio, Acceldata, Evo Security and several other startups.

Before joining Sorenson, Ken was Managing Director at Intel Capital and VP at Intel Corporation. Leading the software and security groups at Intel Capital, Ken invested in several market-leading companies including DocuSign, Forescout, AlienVault (AT&T), AtHoc (Blackberry), Prolexic (Akamai), Venafi, Vectra Networks, Gigya (SAP), BrightEdge, among many others.

Prior to Intel Capital, Ken was a founding general partner at Opus Capital. While at Opus, he served on the boards of Spock Networks (Intelius), Transpond (Webtrends), Supersecret (Knowledge Adventure), Alert Enterprise, Jivox, and TrustedID (Equifax). Previously, Ken was a Senior Associate at both Lightspeed Venture Partners and Battery Ventures. Before business school, Ken worked at Radius, Claris Corporation (the software subsidiary of Apple), and RealNetworks, where he held various sales, marketing, finance, and business development positions.

Ken received an MBA from Harvard Business School and holds a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School of Business. He is a Kauffman Fellow.

Ameya is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Cequence Security, a company disrupting the API security space. Over the past five years, Ameya has helped several Fortune 500 companies across the globe secure their public facing APIs and applications from a variety of threats. Cequence protects over 6 billion API calls daily, for 100+ global brands and has raised over 100 million dollars in venture funding from top tier VC firms in the valley. Ameya has over 20 years of experience in Cyber Security. Previously, Ameya was the engineering head for Symantec’s entire anti-malware platform – responsible for blocking over 5 billion threats annually. Ameya has built several high performance product and threat research teams across the globe, fighting some of the most complex threats.

Piyush is a serial entrepreneur & customer first technologist in building successful cybersecurity products generating over $20- $350M annually. Piyush has been an investor, advisor for multiple startups and helping them strategize the product led growth. Most recently Piyush was CoFounder & CEO @ Accurics which was acquired by Tenable. Currently Piyush is VP/GM of Cloud security products at Tenable.

Randolph brings over 20 years of information technology and leadership experience to the company. He was most recently Head of Security Operations at Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ:ZM) where he was responsible for the aggressive growth of the overall security program on the Zoom platform.

Previously, Randolph was Chief Security Officer at CISCO – WEBEX Communications Senior Vice President and Chief Information and Security Officer at Topia and Senior Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer at Aryaka. He held several leadership positions at leading cloud companies ahead of this. Randolph earned a Bachelor of Administration and Computer Science from the University of Phoenix.

Guru Chahal is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners focusing on early stage enterprise startups in Security, Cloud Infra, DevOps, Observability and Automation. Guru joined Lightspeed after VMware acquired Avi Networks in 2019, where he was a cofounder and focused on Product and GTM. At Lightspeed, he's an investor in category creating companies like Noname Security, Buf, Pensando, Hubilo, Arrcus, Shortwave among others. Guru leverages his founding experience, product expertise and extensive customer network in helping entrepreneurs through funding and beyond. During his operational career, he's worked on three product lines as they’ve gone from inception to over a billion dollar run rate. Before Avi Networks (next generation application services), Guru worked at Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco), and Tropos Networks (acquired by ABB). Guru is an alum of Purdue University School of Engineering and initially worked on distributed systems and networking and holds several patents in the space.