Eric Benhamou has over 40 years of experience in the IT industry, including 14 years of active venture capital experience. He founded Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) in 2003 and made active investments in early stage information technology Silicon Valley firms focused on global enterprise and telecommunications markets. In fund I, he leads investments in Swan Labs (F5), Dasient (TWTR), Voltaire(MLNX), Finjan(FNJN), Contextream (HP) and Load Dynamix. Eric currently serves on the boards of Grid Dynamics, Ayehu, Totango, Secret Double Octopus and 6d bytes, portfolio companies of BGV’s fund II and III.

Prior to his venture capital career, Eric Benhamou built and operated several IT companies and experienced all the stages of growth from start-up to Global Fortune 500. Principally, he served as CEO of 3Com from 1990 to 2000 and as Chairman until 2010 and also served as CEO of Palm until 2003, and subsequently as Chairman of the Board. Both 3Com and Palm were sold to HP in 2010.

Sanjay Nath is the co-founder and Managing Partner at Blume Ventures, one of India’s leading early stage Venture funds.

Blume focuses on seed to Pre-Series A stages of funding and has made over a 100 investments across its 7 year history. Sanjay’s stints at Sun Microsystems, PwC Consulting, IBM Global Services, Loxodrome (a knowledge process outsourcing company he co founded), and Mumbai Angels have given him a breadth of experience across the US and India in Management Consulting, Strategy & Marketing, Technology and Angel Investing. He is an alumni of BITS Pilani and UCLA’s Anderson Graduate School of Management.

At Blume, Sanjay advises and works closely with some of the leading investments at the firm – Grey Orange Robotics, Locus, Tricog, Dataweave, Little Black Book, THB (The Healthy Billions), amongst other emerging stars. He also heads Platform Initiatives, managing relationships with investors, the ecosystem at large, and partnerships – one of the most recent being the Draper Venture Network (DVN).

Ankur is co-founder of Emergent Ventures. Previously, Ankur was a venture investor at Nexus Venture Partners investing in US and India. Prior to that, Ankur was venture investor at Blumberg Capital investing in US and Israel. Prior to that, Ankur did strategy consulting at Accenture across a range of verticals including healthcare, financial services and technology. Earlier, Ankur led product teams at Andiamo Systems and later Cisco which acquired Andiamo in 2004. Ankur’s selected investments include Mertado (acquired by Groupon), Cyvera (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), Mobsmith (acquired by Rubicon Project), BringIT (acquired by International Gaming Technologies) and Arkin (acquired by VMWare).

Ankur holds a Bachelors in in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi, a Masters in Computer Science from UCLA, and an MBA in Management from the Wharton School where he graduated as a Palmer Scholar. Ankur is also a co-inventor for five technology patents. Ankur is Chair for TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) San Francisco.

Radhesh is a seasoned IBM veteran who has a deep and variety of exposure to Technology, Direct and Channel sales. Prior to Arka Venture Labs, Radhesh was Venture Advisor to Blume Ventures, focusing on early stage B2B startups investment and mentoring.

Prior to Blume he was leading the Global Entrepreneur Program, for IBM India and South Asia. He conceptualized IBM India`s Startup challenge called IBM India Smartcamp and successfully executed the same. Personally curated the Startups for the finals, many of whom got funding either for the first time or for their subsequent rounds. He exhibited strong leadership in steering the Startup initiative of IBM from scratch to one of the companies to be reckoned by the Startup ecosystem in India and generating strong revenues for IBM India Cloud business. Has core competency in evaluating startups leveraging technology and advising them on areas of improvement from business and technology standpoint.

Yashwanth Hemaraj is a venture capital investor at Benhamou Global Ventures. At BGV, his focus areas are technologies that drive the digital transformation of enterprises – ranging from cloud technologies, customer centric applications, cyber security, industrial IoT, to blockchain and advanced analytics solutions.

Yashwanth’s investments include companies such as Tagnos, Totango, 6dbytes, Macrometa and OneMob. He regularly advises entrepreneurs in multiple aspects of startups, including fundraising, go-to-market strategy and product development and is a mentor at various accelerators. Prior to BGV, Yashwanth was one of the first engineers at SpiderCloud Wireless, a venture backed bay area startup building indoor wireless systems. He graduated with a MBA from the Kellogg School of Management, and MS in Electrical Engineering from University of Maryland.

Alok ran a product strategy consulting firm advising a number of high growth startups. Prior to that, Alok was a Director of Product at TempoAI and later at Salesforce which acquired TempoAI in 2016. Earlier, Alok led product teams at YuMe (IPO: NYSE) where he joined at an early stage and experienced its evolution into a public company. Prior to that, Alok held multiple product management roles at Microsoft, with the last one in Windows Azure. Alok was also co-founder of ToneThis a mobile technology startup. Alok holds a Bachelors in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kharagpur, a Masters and Ph.D. in Computer Science from UCLA. Alok is also a co-inventor for three technology patents.

Fields of Interest: AI and Cloud Infrastructure
Personal: Alok is an avid tennis player and lives in Santa Clara with his wife and two daughters (aged 4 yrs and 4 months!).