Bipin Shah, Chairman & CEO

Bipin Shah has a strong record of accomplishment as a senior executive and as a successful early stage investor in more than a dozen companies. He assumed the role of CEO and Chairman of Kovair in August 2005. After a varied career at Fairchild Semiconductor where he held Engineering, Manufacturing and Business Unit Management responsibility, Bipin joined Altera Corporation, a leading manufacturer of programmable logic devices at its early inception in 1984. As a member of Altera's executive management team, he held positions of VP, Operations and President of Altera Japan, and was operationally responsible for revenue growth from zero to over $500 million run rate in 1994, and participated in Altera's IPO in 1989. From 1997 to 1999, Bipin served as President and CEO of a chip startup Invox Technology, whose multi-level Flash memory technology was acquired by SanDisk Corporation. Between the years 2000 and 2005, Bipin was a co-founder and general partner of an early stage venture investment fund, INC3 Ventures based in Silicon Valley.

Bipin holds a MS degree in Electrical Engineering from University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a BEE (Honors) from Jadavpur University, Kolkata, India.

Rajsekhar Bhattacharjee - Vice President, Product Deliveries &
GM Kolkata Operations

Rajsekhar is responsible for Kovair's product and services delivery, Including product development, testing, quality, and support functions. Rajsekhar started his career working on business application development and information technology consulting, and has worked across the SDLC in the development of several business applications and products in a variety of platforms and technologies. Rajsekhar has led the development of several new custom applications and products, and has held various technical, project management, and senior management positions in Silicon Valley technology startups speeDEV Inc. and Zenasis Technologies, as well as in software services companies like Datamatics, BFL (Mphasis), and PCL Mindware in India. He has worked with clients in India, Asia Pacific and in the US, and has lived and worked in different parts of India and USA. Most recently Rajsekhar completed a five-year tenure at IBM Global Services, India where he held competency development and delivery excellence responsibilities. Rajsekhar brings with him over 26 years of experience in various positions and companies in the software industry after completing his graduation from Jadavpur University in Computer Science in 1985, and was among the top of his class. Rajsekhar is also a B.Sc. in Physics.

Mukesh Ahuja, VP, Business & Corporate Development

Mukesh is a Silicon Valley based technology professional with over 15 years of experience at software, Internet and mobile companies. Mukesh has worked with several companies in business development, fundraising and M&A, including MobiDEOS (mobile videos and surveillance), Yugma (web conferencing), and MINO Wireless (mobile VoIP application).

Mukesh founded an Internet portal in 1998 called Asia-Links Media. He led the company from concept to being one of the top-3 portals for Asia business information. Under Mukesh's leadership Asia-Links raised $6.5 million from venture funds and corporate investors.  

Mukesh started his career in engineering and marketing at the Artificial Intelligence group at DEC. Mukesh received a BS degree from IIT Bombay and an MS degree from MIT. Mukesh was president of the 6000-member MIT Club of Northern California and a board member of MIT/Stanford Venture Lab.

Raj Mashruwala, Independent Director

Mr. Raj Mashruwala retired from TIBCO Software Inc. as an Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. TIBCO Software, based in Palo Alto California, was founded in 1997 and did its initial public offering in July of 1999 (NASDAX: TIBX). Since the founding of TIBCO, Raj. Mashruwala built and led the worldwide sales and marketing operations. As Chief Operating Officer, Raj was also responsible for Engineering, Professional and Support Services.
Prior to joining TIBCO, Raj Mashruwala co-founded YieldUp International, a semiconductor equipment manufacturing company, Media Computer Technology Inc., a multimedia PC Bus company and Consilium Inc., a Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES) software provider. Raj led Consilium's R&D and Professional Services Operations since the company's inception.
Raj Mashruwala is an active angel investor through Mashruwala Investments and is a mentor/advisor to several early startup ventures.
Raj holds a Master of Science (Engineering) degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Technology (Mechanical) from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from IIT Bombay in 2002.
Raj holds several patents on Object Oriented Modeling for Manufacturing Systems.
He has served on the Technical Committee of the UID Authority of India – Unique ID for every citizen of India, led by Nandan Nilekani, former CEO of Infosys, a major global IT Services company.

Sridar Iyengar, Independent Director

Sridar is an independent mentor investor in early stage start-up companies. For more than 35 years, he has worked in the U.K., U.S. and India with a large number of companies, advising them on strategy and other issues through his various positions at KPMG.
Sridar is the President of Foundation for Democratic Reforms in India, a U.S.-based non-profit organization. He is also an advisor to several venture and private equity funds in India.
Earlier, Sridar was a senior partner with KPMG in the U.S. and U.K. and served for three years as the Chairman and CEO of KPMG's operations in India.
Sridar holds a Bachelor of Commerce (Hons) degree from the University of Calcutta and is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales.
Sirdar currently serves on the boards of Infosys Technologies, ICICI Bank and Rediff.

Advisory Board Members

Tsuyoshi Taira, CEO of Tazan International

Tsuyoshi Taira is the CEO of Tazan International, a Venture Capital and Management Consultancy Firm. Mr. Taira has been involved with a number of Silicon Valley startup companies as founding investor/director including Atmel Semiconductor (NASDAQ: ATML), Pico Power Technology Inc (acquired by Cirrus Logic), Junglee Corporation (acquired by Amazon.com, NASDAQ: AMZN), Armedia (acquired by Broadcom, NASDAQ: BRCM), Apptivity (acquired by Progress Software, NASDAQ: PRGS) and many others. He has been instrumental in providing seed stage financing, management and marketing advice, especially for the Far Eastern market to the startup companies. Currently he serves on the boards of HCD corporation(IC connectors), GXT Inc (global exchange and green products distribution), Simo Wireless Inc (international Data roaming) and Novatec of Japan (middleware development).
He is the board advisor of Tsunami on The Road venture capital firm of Japan
Previously, Mr. Taira was Chairman of Sanyo Semiconductor directing Sanyo’s US marketing strategy. Most of his career was spent at Sanyo Corporation except for five years when he worked at Fairchild Semiconductor.

Mr. Taira graduated from Tokyo Metropolitan University with a BSEE. He also received an Honorary Doctor of Humanities from Anaheim University in March 2000.
He is a charter member of TiE – The Indus Entrepreneurs from 2002 and Charter member of AAMA.

Roy Prasad

Roy Prasad is an entrepreneur and executive with 30 years of experience in semiconductors and software. He was most recently Vice President for advanced IC manufacturing technologies at Cadence Design Systems. From 2003 until acquisition by Cadence in 2007, he was the co-founder and CEO of Invarium a developer of industry-leading computational lithography solutions for chip design. Roy was an advisor and angel investor with several successful startup companies, including CyberMedia, Versata, Ambit Design Systems, PostX and MobiDough. From 1983-91, he was a co-founder and Vice President of Engineering at P-CAD, the most widely used electronic design automation software for over a decade that was acquired by Cadam/IBM in 1990.

Roy earned his BE from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, and an MSEE from the University of New Hampshire.
Roy is one of the eighteen co-founders of TiE, an organization dedicated to networking and entrepreneurship.