Praveen Akkiraju

Praveen Akkiraju is a Managing Director at Insight Partners based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He brings a product and operational lens to investing in passionate entrepreneurs who seek to challenge the status quo in the areas of Automation, Data platforms, DevOps, and Infrastructure software.

Praveen spent the early part of his career in the trenches, building products and scaling engineering teams to build world class platforms in highly competitive market segments. As CEO of VCE and Viptela, Praveen has lived through the experience of navigating startups thru the product strategy, team building, and Go-To-Market scaling required to build 100M+ revenue businesses.

Prior to Insight, Praveen served as a Managing Partner at the Softbank Vision Fund where he lead the Enterprise and SaaS investment practice. His investments include Automation Anywhere and the Team8 Startup foundry where he currently serves as board advisor. As CEO, he led Viptela, Inc. a SaaS platform for Enterprise Edge from early stage to $100M+ in run rate revenues leading up to an acquisition by Cisco Systems, Inc. Praveen has also served as the CEO at VCE, an Enterprise Cloud infrastructure company that created a new market category and became one of the fastest Data Center companies to achieve US$1bn in revenues.

Praveen holds BS and MS degrees in Electrical Engineering and is an alumnus of the Harvard Business School. In his spare time, Praveen spends his time mentoring bright individuals and founders as they seek to define their paths. He is also an avid traveler, ethnic food lover, & hiker.