Praveen Akkiraju, Insight Partners

Growing up, Praveen Akkiraju used to bike to the edge of an airfield to watch the planes take off. He always imagined jumping on one and figuring out how things worked. The entirety of his career has been filled with leaps of faith, climbing on board a metaphorical aircraft and figuring out how to make it rise and fly to far-off destinations.

Akkiraju spent the early part of his career building products and scaling engineering teams to build world-class platforms in highly competitive market segments. At Cisco, he worked on some of the foundational protocols and platforms underlying the largest distributed system ever built — the Internet. The lessons learned at Cisco led him to the CEO role at VCE, a Cloud Infrastructure company where they created a new market category and became one of the fastest companies to achieve US$1bn in revenue. Later on Praveen became CEO at Viptela, where he led the early-stage Enterprise SaaS platform to $100M+ in run-rate revenues.

As Managing Director at Insight Partners, Praveen aims to bring a product and operational lens to investing for those seeking to challenge the status quo in the areas of automation, data platforms, DevOps, security and infrastructure software. For him, the joy lies in diving in with passionate entrepreneurs to understand how they translate their market insights, technical skills, and ambition into a strategy for the market.

Akkiraju believes great companies are built by individuals who dare to take a chance, trust their abilities and insight, and go for it. Above all, he values relationships and working with great people who bring exceptional clarity into how they will create value and joy for the customer well beyond what is on offer in the market. Investing is a journey with founders. Praveen brings his hands-on product experience and Insight’s unparalleled resources to the task of building an enduring company.