Board of Advisors

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.

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 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.