Cervin Ventures Expands Leadership Team by Naming Shirish Sathaye as General Partner

Palo Alto, CA – October 8, 2018 – Cervin Ventures today announced the expansion of its leadership team with Shirish Sathaye joining as a General Partner and Samir Shah joining as Operating Partner.

“We are excited to have Shirish join us to bring his unique expertise in enterprise technology from being Head of Engineering at public technology companies and holding GP roles at Matrix Partners, Khosla Ventures and Formation 8,” said Preetish Nijhawan, General Partner and co-founder at Cervin Ventures. “Our vision is to become trusted partners and a resource to founders building next-generation software companies. Shirish’s deep technology insights and outstanding investment instincts will provide Cervin with additional firepower as we seek out the best in this sector.”

Prior to Cervin Ventures, Shirish was a General Partner at Formation 8 where he remains a partner in their Fund II. He was also a General Partner at Khosla Ventures and at Matrix Partners for nearly a decade. Shirish’s prior investments include Aruba Networks (NASDAQ:ARUN), Nutanix (NASDAQ: NTNX), Grandis (acquired by Samsung), Solidcore Systems (acquired by McAfee), Panzura, and Vectra Networks.

Shirish’s investing career was preceded by a long operating career at technology companies. He helped build two venture backed companies, FORE Systems and Alteon Websystems, and led the design and development of their core products. Both companies pioneered important new product categories that led to successful multi-billion dollar IPOs. Additionally, Shirish ran the Engineering Group at FORE Systems, a pioneer in ATM Switched Networks. FORE went public in 1994 and was eventually sold to Marconi for $4B. In 1997, Shirish joined Alteon Websystems, which created the server-load-balancer product category, as its VP of Engineering and later, its CTO. Alteon went public in 1999 and was acquired by Nortel for $7.8B.

“I’m very grateful to be able to work with companies during their seed stage again, as it’s a very exciting time for new technology in enterprise infrastructure,” said Shirish Sathaye, General Partner at Cervin Ventures. “I am looking forward to joining the team and being a part of the next wave of enterprise software investments from a firm that uses a process based approach and provides strong operational support for first time founders.”

In addition to Shirish’s hire, the firm has also brought on Samir Shah as Operating Partner. Prior to Cervin Ventures, Samir founded and ran Zephyr as its CEO. The company was recently acquired by Francisco Partners’ backed SmartBear Software.

“Samir has been instrumental in building a company from the ground-up,” said Neeraj Gupta, General Partner and co-founder at Cervin Ventures. “He understands the needs of first time entrepreneurs, and we are thrilled to have Samir join the team alongside Shirish. With Samir’s addition to the team, we plan to institutionalize our support structure across strategy, leadership development, and various functional areas.”

Cervin Ventures is a pre-Series A venture capital firm focused on investing in the next wave of enterprise technology. The firm partners with founders early in their journey as they are building products, exploring product market fit, and developing a scalable economic model. The firm has a unique model to support entrepreneurs through seed (and post-seed rounds) with the goal of driving meaningful returns for founders through a traditional VC or capital efficient high-growth development path. Cervin Ventures’ portfolio companies include QuanticMind, Allyo, Catch & Release, StackShare, Zycada, Punchh, SnapLogic, Edcast, and more. Exits have included Involver (acquired by Oracle), Replay Technologies (acquired by Intel), Soha Systems (acquired by Akamai), and Zephyr (acquired by SmartBear).

For more information about Cervin Ventures, please visit www.cervinventures.com.

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Eric Gonzalez

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VSC for Cervin Ventures

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