Chris Rust Email & Phone Number

Menlo Park, CA, US

San Francisco, CA, US

Founded by former EY AI CTO Dr. Nigel Duffy, Cynch provides reasoning, machine learning, and Generative AI for financial decision making.

Founded by the original creators of Apache Sedona Dr. Mo Sarwat and Dr. Jia Yu, Wherobots is the leading Data+AI platform for spatial and temporal analytics at Internet scale. The Wherobots AI platform is trusted in mission-critical production use cases at leading enterprises around the globe. Joined BoD in June 2023.

Richmond, California, US

Founded by Dr. Parham Aghdasi, AICRETE reduce both the cost and environmental impact of concrete through a unique "recipe-as-a-service" approach that leverages artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and highly specialized concrete material science domain knowledge. AICRETE's vertical SaaS platform works with concrete producers to characterize.

Palo Alto, California, US

Founded by Dr. Ritu Lal and Soujanya Bhumkar, Gen1E has built a unique and formidable AI/ML platform to accelerate end-to-end therapeutic drug discovery, development and commercialization. Gen1E has designed proprietary Machine Learning models that uses disease mapping databases to identify other indications for the drug portfolio and treatment pathways.

San Francisco, California, US

Founded by Dr. Spence Green and Dr. Jon DeNiro, Lilt is the most advanced AI solution for enterprise translation and Localization. Lilt's mission is to make the world’s information available to everyone in their preferred language

Palo Alto, CA, US

Acante.AI Identifies and eliminates data security gaps in the Cloud with the industry’s first end-to-end data security platform that empowers security teams to comprehensively protect the ever-growing data attack surface in their cloud-native environments.

Sunnyvale, California, US

Avicena is the pioneer and industry leader in LED-based interconnects for Tbps-scale chip-to-chip communications. Avicena's LightBundle™ interconnect achieves 10x – 100x power and density improvements over any alternative for 1 cm – 10 meter reach.

Seattle, WA, US

Tignis combines the precise insights of physics with the most advanced AI and ML data science to give semiconductor equipment manufacturers, wafer fabs, and components and materials suppliers unprecedented automation and process control. Their unique physics-driven AI models allow advanced manufacturers to exploit a new future based on big data analytics.

Concentric is the leading provider of autonomous data security (ADS) solutions for the modern enterprise. Their world class team of security software experts are disrupting the foundational data monitoring and protection layer of the enterprise security stack with deep ML. Concentric is the industry's first "semantic data intelligence" platform to be able.

Palo Alto, CA, US

Venture Capital investor. Founding Partner of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm that is purpose-built to help startup teams win in DeepTech, AI, and the Intelligent Enterprise. With $335M of committed capital from a world-class institutional investor base that has over $200B of AUM, Clear provides capital, connections, and company building assistance.

Atmosic Technologies is a stealth mode startup working on next-generation low power platforms for the Internet-of-Things (IoT). The Atmosic team were previously key product leaders at Aetheros Communications from company inception through IPO and acquisition by Qualcomm. See www.atmosic.com for information about job opportunities with this world-class team.

Arrcus is a networking software company that sells ArcOC - the first hyper-scalable software network operating system. With a robust Internet-scale L3 routing capability, built-in YANG/OpenConfig support, and a best-in-class dataplane abstraction layer to enable the broadest merchant chipset support, and a cutting edge cloud-native design, ArcOS enables.

Berlin, DE

Formerly GoEuro. The leading European travel metasearch engine for comparing the price and journey time of air, rail and bus travel options in a single search. Sourced. Advisor. Series A investor.

San Francisco, California, US

Swift Navigation provides centimeter-accurate geo-location and positioning technology for high value industrial applications such as machine-controlled agriculture, drones, vehicles, and construction, anywhere on Earth. Their products deliver 100 times better accuracy than the GPS in your cell phone - at a tenth of the price of the competition. Swift.

Palo Alto, California, US

Espresa is the world’s first fully inclusive Culture Benefits® platform for enterprises worldwide. Their enterprise SaaS product provides an immersive employee experience and create a workplace powered by total wellbeing, community, and recognition. Espresa's easy to use and intuitive workflow automation software streamlines employee reimbursements.

San Jose, California, US

Software vendor re-imagining the IT infrastructure stack for big data and analytics workloads. Robin enables distributed computing applications that traditionally require dedicated clusters to be provisioned in minutes, scaled from 10s to 1000s of nodes, share data across applications, and achieve higher application performance on a fraction of the.

San Mateo, California, US

Software vendor that helps retailers win by dramatically increasing digital shopper conversion rates from site visit to purchase order. Sourced. Advisor. Series A investor. Marquee customers include Disney, Converse, Uniqlo, O'Neill, and Gander Mountain. In October 2015 named "Digital Commerce Startup of the Year" by Shop.org. Acquired by Sitecore in 2/21.

Boston, Massachusetts, US

Software vendor providing the leading IT resiliency, business continuity, disaster recovery, and workload mobility solution for private and public cloud computing environments. Deployed at 9000+ customers across 50+ countries worldwide. USVP's 8/11 Series B investment in Zerto was sourced and led by Jacques Benkoski. I contributed to the investment.

San Mateo, CA, US

The world's most versatile camera. Sourced. Avid product user. Active advisor to company from Dec 2008 to March 2011 on product roadmap and corporate strategy. Wrote the first PRD to "network connect" the Hero cameras via wireless for live streaming and wireless remote control use cases. Member of the 4Q10 Cineform acquisition team, now the "GoPro Studio".

Menlo Park, CA, US

Venture capital investor. Responsible for investments in 14 early stage companies, starting 9x at seed/series A and 5x at series B. The first 7 exits created $12.7B+ of market cap from 1 IPO and 6 acquisitions, and include GoPro (GPRO), Dune (BRCM) and LVL7 (BRCM). The remaining companies are active, and include Appthority, CloudPassage, Kaiam, and Zerto..

San Francisco, California, US

Software vendor using advanced analytics to help enterprises identify and stop the significant security threat from malware embedded deeply in mobile and enterprise applications. Investment team member and formal series A co-sponsor (USVP's first investment round). In November 2014 Appthority's App Risk Management service was named a Best Application.

Beijing, CN

Semiconductor manufacturer selling advanced wireless communication ICs for the Chinese Digital TV standard called DTMB. Investment team member and formal series B co-sponsor (USVP's first investment round). In November 2014 AltoBeam announced a design win for their DTMB tuners with Samsung Electronics.

Sunnyvale, CA, US

The leading vendor of high performance packet switching and traffic management solutions. Sourced. Series B lead investor. Acquired by Broadcom in January 2010 for $205m. The core platform ICs inside the Arista 7500.

Semiconductor vendor selling adaptive channel equalization ICs for broadband mobile infrastructure. First USVP investment made in December 2002. Independent diligence lead and formal series D investment co-sponsor in April 2009. Made first introduction to NetLogic in November 2010 via VP Strategy Kelvin Khoo, which led to the acquisition in April 2011 for.

Software to help online banks, brokerages, and retailers secure the consumer desktop from financial malware attacks and fraudulent websites. Investment team member and formal series A co-sponsor (USVP's first investment round). In July 2008 flew to Tel Aviv for the first meeting between USVP and Trusteer to help secure investment in a highly competitive.

US

Software for enterprise infrastructure. Acquired by Broadcom in January 2007 for $105m.

Software for e-commerce infrastructure. First USVP investment made in October 2000. Assumed existing USVP BoD seat from Jan 2005 to acquisition by Digital River in Dec 2005 for $50m.

US

The world's first 320Gbps metro core ethernet switch with integrated STS1 cross-connect. Seed/founding investor. Interim CEO from February 2002 to October 2004. Acquired Photuris and brought the industry's first ROADM to market. Design wins at Buckeye Telecom, Equinix, FP&L, MCI, Qwest, SCANA, TWT, VZ, and others. Merger with Meriton in November 2005, then.

The first 8 core, 4 thread per core chip multi-processor. Sourced. Series A investor. Acquired by SUN Microsystems, and became the Niagra processor families, now the core technology inside the multi-$B Oracle Exadata franchise. The Afara team went on to lead 1,000+ engineering team at Oracle for core CPU development, and went on to found Ambarella (IPO.

Menlo Park, CA, US

Associate - February 1998 to November 1999; Partner - November 1999 to July 2002Venture capital investor. Responsible for early stage investments in 15 companies across Sequoia Capital funds VII to X, starting 13x at seed/series A and 2x at series B. These startup teams created $19.5B+ in market cap from 2 IPOs, 12 acquisitions, and 1 out-of-business.

US

The first multi-service provisioning platform (MSPP) with 10Gbps OC192 ports. Sourced. Series A/founding investor. With over $100m in ttm revenues, merger of equals with Force10 Networks in May 2009, then acquired by DELL in July 2011 for $700m.

Software vendor selling advanced control plane solutions for telephony applications over the Internet. Series A/founding investor. Acquired by Alcatel in July of 2002 for $136m.

Sunnyvale, CA, US

The inventor of "Infiniband", and a leading provider of high performance interconnect solutions for HPC applications. Sourced. Series A/founding investor for Sequoia Capital, in collaboration with USVP as the series A co-lead. April 2007 IPO under ticker MLNX. See www.mellanox.com. Acquired by NVidia for $6.9B in 3/19.

Network security appliance. Series B investor. Acquired by Juniper Networks in July 2002. The Nexsi 32 core network security processor's A0 tape-out produced over $150m in revenue for Juniper.The Nexsi team went on to form the core engineering team of RMI, which was acquired by NetLogic and drove the Broadcom acquisition of NetLogic for their core network.

The first voice-over-IP solution to enable telephony on the Internet. Sourced. Series A investor. Acquired by Intel Corporation in April 2001 for $550m.The VxTel team went on to found Virident which was acquired by Western Digital in September 2013 for $685m.

The first OC48 classification processor. Sourced. Series A/founding investor. Acquired by PMC Sierra in September 2000 for $450m.

Software vendor building caching solutions. Acquired from incubation by Cacheflow in July 2000.

The first 320 Gbps packet switch. Series A/founding investor. Acquired by PMC Sierra in August of 2000 for $400m prior to series B.The Abrizio Founder Dr. Nick McKeown went on to co-found Nicira, which was acquired by VMWare in July of 2012 for $1.26B.

US

The first interleaving filter for DWDM systems to enable 50GHz wavelength spacing. Seed/founding investor. Acting Director of Product Management for first year after seed financing. Helped transition the company from a ROADM systems vendor to a merchant component vendor commercializing their best-in-class interleaving filter. February 2000 IPO under ticker.

Software vendor selling operations support system solutions for Internet infrastructure. Sourced. Series A investor. Acquired by Subex Azure in January 2007 for $164.5m.

US

Network security appliance. Diligence team member and formal series B investment co-sponsor (1st VC round). IPO under ticker NSCN in Dec 2001, then acquired by JNPR in April 2004 for $4.2B.

US

Responsible for managing the product line of an early stage telecommunications equipment manufacturer selling multi-line voice and data T1 and T3 multiplexers. Managed customer service and support for 35 CLEC customers including Brooks, GTE, Sprint, TCG, Worldcom. Launched the industry’s first 1 RU SNMP-managed M13 multiplexer, with over 1000 M13s shipped.

Responsible for writing the functional specifications and product requirements for a DSP-intensive Gigabit-over-copper Ethernet PHY transceiver, working with customers to validate the design specifications, managing program schedules, and defining the product roadmap. Left company to move back to Boulder, Colorado for family reasons. Acquired by National.

Responsible for PLM on three generations of products; InnerWare G3 “router-on-a-PCMCIA card”, BANC 6000 (the world’s first DSL access multiplexer), and BANC 9000 multi-service access switch. Helped grow the G3 module OEM business 800% from $0.5 Million to $4 Million in sale from customers such as Westell, Orkit, Amati, and Pairgain. Fluent in xDSL, T1, T3.

Founding Team Member (badge #2) with Founder Dr Mario Vecchi, and Lead Network Architect for broadband internet service pioneer Roadrunner (re-branded as Time Warner Cable Internet). With over 13 million subscribers and $4 Billion in CY14 revenue, Roadrunner has since grown to be one of the largest mass market residential broadband Internet service.

Software programmer and systems engineer in the Broadband Architecture Group. Performed modeling, simulation, traffic engineering, and capacity planning for early packet-based transport and switching infrastructure. Worked on Frame Relay, ATM, IP backbone, and digital loop carrier deployment initiatives. Wrote technical specifications for RFPs and did.

Boulder, Colorado, US

January 1990 to May 1991 - Teaching Assistant for senior year and first year graduate EE/CS and telecommunications engineering classes such as communication theory, telecommunications systems engineering, C programming in the UNIX environment, computer & local area networks. Fair trade for waived tuition and a wish sandwich stipend.June 1991 to June 1994.

Mclean, VA, US

Full and part time software programmer doing R&D on fast packet networks and military communications systems. Implemented protocols, wrote and tested algorithms, developed various modulation and encoding approaches, and did network simulation for large scale network infrastructure deployments. Worked on FTS-2000, the national airspace communications.

Full and part time co-op student employee at Wang Labs in Lowell Massachusetts. Started as a soldering technician reworking a variety of PCBs. Wrote GIPB and IEEE488 test automation software for the manufacture of mainframe motherboards. Developed and maintained a high throughput automated test harness to do functional verification and ICT of mainframe.

Espoo, Southern Finland, FI

Electronic technician building microwave radio equipment. Programmer writing manufacturing test automation scripts and embedded systems software. Installed communications equipment throughout Scandinavia and Eastern Europe. Developed a deep respect for the Finnish people.

Master Of Engineering (Meng), Engineering Management

Master Of Science (Ms), Telecommunications Engineering

Master Of Science (Ms), Electrical Engineering

Bachelor Of Science (Bs), Electrical Engineering