Kumar Ganapathy

Kumar Ganapathy believes in the power of entrepreneurship to positively impact the world. He has been a serial technology entrepreneur and angel investor for over 25 years in Silicon Valley. Recently, he is a founder and Managing Director of 3iPartners, an early stage impact fund that invests in promising social entrepreneurs in India in the areas of Agriculture, Livelihood, Education and Healthcare. 3iPartners’ mission is to enable societal change through entrepreneurship, and has invested in 10+ impact startups in India over the past 2 years. He is an investor and board advisor to Peopleshores (creating tech jobs to underprivileged communities in the US), has recently joined the board of Upaya Ventures, and is associated with other nonprofits in the Bay area and India.

Kumar has founded multiple successful start-ups over the past 25 years across Telecom and Enterprise IT infrastructure : (i) VxTel (acquired by Intel in 2001) for Voice-over-IP carrier technology, (ii) Virident (acquired by Western Digital in 2013) for high-performance flash storage technology, (iii) Enterprise labs, a “foundry” for Enterprise Cloud startups, where he helped launch multiple companies (Akridata, PrimaryIO, Ampool, DeepVision) over the past 5 years. He is currently Chairman of Akridata (Visual AI Platform) and board member at Position2 (Digital advertising), and angel investor in a number of tech startups. Prior to his entrepreneurial career, Kumar was Principal Engineer and Fellow of Conexant and Rockwell Semiconductor.

Kumar has received his Ph.D from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), MS from University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and B.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology at Chennai. He is the recipient of the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras, Fellow of Conexant/Rockwell, and Siemens Gold medal winner at IIT. Kumar has over 75 patents and 12 technical publications. He loves to ski with his wife and two children, as well as hike and travel with friends and family.