Verayo Team

Anant Agrawal
President and CEO (acting), Board Member
Anant Agrawal brings over 25 years of semiconductor and system industry experience to his CEO role at Verayo. Prior to Verayo, Anant was the founding CEO of Insilica, a fabless semiconductor company with operations in India, Slovenia and United States.

 

Anant spent a significant part of his career at Sun Microsystems from 1984 to 2002. Anant was one of the founding members of the team that started SPARC processor program at Sun. Over the years his teams designed a number of microprocessors and released them to production. For 7 years he was the Vice President and General Manager of the processor business unit. Anant began his career as a design engineer for Memorex Corporation and then joined STC Computer Research Corporation, where he was the lead technical designer of the floating point unit for an IBM compatible mainframe. Anant has also consulted for a number of Public companies and startups strategies and product development. He is currently also an advisor to Khosla Ventures.

 

Anant holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the MS University of Baroda, India and an M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University.

 

Professor Srini Devadas
Founder and CTO, Board Member
Professor Srini Devadas is one of the founders of Verayo. Professor Devadas and his team invented PUF technology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, USA. In addition to providing technical leadership and direction to Verayo, Professor Devadas serves on the faculty of MIT, as the Associate Head of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Professor Devadas’s research interests include Computer-Aided Design (CAD) of VLSI computing systems, computer architecture, and computer security, and he has co-authored numerous papers in these areas.

 

Professor Devadas joined MIT in 1988, soon after completing his Ph.D from University of California, Berkeley. Professor Devadas got his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from IIT Madras (India).

 

Vinod Khosla
Board Member
Vinod Khosla was a co-founder of Daisy Systems and founding Chief Executive Officer of Sun Microsystems where he pioneered open systems and commercial RISC processors.

 

Sun was funded by Kleiner Perkins and in 1986 Vinod switched sides and joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB). In 2004, driven by the need for flexibility and a desire to be more experimental, to fund sometimes imprudent "science experiments", and to take on both "for profit" and for "social impact" ventures, he formed Khosla Ventures. Khosla Ventures focuses on both traditional venture capital technology investments and clean technology ventures. Social ventures include affordable housing, microfinance among others.

 

Vinod holds a Bachelor of Technology in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology in New Delhi, a Master's in Biomedical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

 

Vivek Khandelwal
Director of Marketing
Vivek Khandelwal is the Director of Marketing at Verayo. Vivek brings 15 years of industry experience spanning engineering, product management and marketing functions. Vivek's prime focus at Verayo is the business and marketing strategy for Verayo's unclonable RFIDs. Prior to joining Verayo, Vivek was at BEA Systems Inc. where, as the Director of Marketing, he led BEA’s RFID marketing effort. Before BEA, Vivek spent 10 years at Sun Microsystems in various roles, the most recent role focused at driving Sun’s go-to-market efforts around RFID solutions. His previous roles at Sun were in Java/J2EE, Solaris System Software, Network Computers and Advanced Graphics technologies. Before joining Sun, Vivek was a member of the technical staff at Wipro Infotech’s Global R&D Center.

 

Vivek has a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from the Institute of Technology, BHU, India, and an MBA from the Leavey School of Business in Santa Clara University, USA.

 

Richard Sowell
Hardware Engineering Manager
Richard Sowell assumed the role of Hardware Engineering Manager at Verayo in January 2007, heading up all hardware engineering activities. Richard brings to Verayo extensive experience and management of R&D activities in the semiconductor field. Prior to joining Verayo, Richard was a Director of Engineering at Broadcom where he led Fibre Channel switch and security product developments; responsibilities included all aspects of ASIC development, EDA, design methodology, silicon process technology, manufacturing and strategic partnerships.  Prior to Broadcom, Richard led ASIC development groups at several start-ups at the Vice-president and Senior Director levels. Richard is a named inventor of 5 patents in the area of semiconductor R&D.

 

Richard holds a BSEE in Electrical & Computer Engineering from Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR.

 

William Bares
Software Engineering Manager
William (Bill) Bares joined Verayo in the role of Software Engineering Manager. Bill has over 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry in both hardware and software development. Bill was last at Intelleflex, an RFID company, where he was the Director of Reader Hardware and Software. There he performed the roles of architect and manager for the company’s multi-user, multitasking and web enabled reader development. Bill was a long time consultant where he concentrated on system, chip and software architectures.

 

Tom Ziola
Founder, Advisor

Tom Ziola is one of the co-founders of Verayo. Tom served as the President and CEO of Verayo till May 2008. Tom Ziola was formerly founding Vice President of Business Development at WebTV, Vice President of Corporate Development at Microsoft-UltimateTV, GM Biz Dev & Sales at MSN-TV, Senior Director for Mobile & Embedded Devices at Microsoft, and XBOX Tiger Team member. He has over 15 years experience in business development, start-up management, and venture capital creating strategic business relationships with leading consumer electronics, internet & interactive video services, US government agencies, and has participated actively on international standards. A former Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, Tom focuses on technology start-ups and has multiple patents issued and/or pending on internet infrastructure and security technology and is a member of the American Electronics Association and serves on several AeA committees on Security, Privacy, and Government Affairs.

 

Tom has an MBA from the Stanford Business School, an MA from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, and a BA from Brown University and studied information technology at MIT.

 

Dr. Taher Elgamal
Advisor
Dr. Elgamal is a leading expert in computer, network and information security. Also, recognized in the industry as the "inventor of SSL," Dr. Elgamal led the SSL efforts at Netscape and throughout the industry.  He also wrote the SSL patent and promoted SSL as the Internet Security standard within standard committees and the industry. Dr. Elgamal invented several industry and government standards in data security and digital signatures area, including the DSS government standard for digital signatures. Several thousand publications have been written in the space referred to as "the ElGamal Cryptography." He developed the basic work that has been adopted by about ten companies for commercial products and for several IEEE and ISO standards.  This work has also been adapted for the DSS government standard for digital signatures and is the basis for the Elliptic Curve encryption methods recently introduced in the industry. Dr. Elgamal has public company board experience with RSA Security, hi/fn, Phoenix Technology and Tumbleweed.

 

Dr. Elgamal holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Cairo University.

 

Fred Weber
Advisor
Fred Weber is currently President and CEO of MetaRAM, a venture backed fables semiconductor startup focusing on bringing added value to the memory subsystems of servers, storage systems and network equipment. He spent the last 10 years at AMD helping to bring real competition to the microprocessor market with products like the AMD Athlon and AMD Opteron. At AMD Fred held positions of Vice President of Design and Chief Technical Officer. Prior to AMD Fred worked at several influential startups including Encore Computer, Kendall Square Research and Nexgen.

 

Fred holds a BA in Physics from Harvard University and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.