# Goutham Rao

> Goutham “Gou” Rao is the co-founder and CEO of NeuBird, which develops AI for production operations. An engineer and repeat founder based in Los Altos, California, he previously co-founded Net6, Ocarina Networks and Portworx, acquired by Citrix, Dell and Pure Storage respectively. His work spans networking, storage, security and AI-assisted incident investigation.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at NeuBird
- **Organizations:** NeuBird, Portworx, Pure Storage, Ocarina Networks, Dell, Net6, Citrix Systems, Intel, Lockheed Martin
- **From:** Brooklyn, New York, United States
- **Education:** MS in Computer Science, University of Pennsylvania, Bachelor of Engineering, Bangalore University
- **Known for:** Co-founded three companies acquired by Citrix, Dell and Pure Storage., Credited with more than 50 issued patents spanning computer networking, storage and security., Co-founded Portworx, the subject of Pure Storage’s approximately $370 million acquisition agreement in 2020.

## Career timeline

- **Before Net6** — Worked in operating systems architecture at Intel; also held an architecture role at Lockheed Martin.
- **2004** — Net6, where Rao was co-founder and CTO, was acquired by Citrix; Rao served as CTO of the Advanced Solutions Group.
- **2010** — Dell acquired Ocarina Networks, where Rao was co-founder, CTO and chief architect.
- **Before Portworx** — Served as CTO and executive director of Dell’s Data Protection division.
- **2014** — Co-founded Portworx and served as CTO.
- **2020** — Pure Storage announced an approximately $370 million cash acquisition agreement for Portworx.
- **2023** — Co-founded NeuBird with Vinod Jayaraman.
- **2024** — NeuBird announced a $22 million seed investment led by Mayfield.
- **2026** — NeuBird announced a $19.3 million funding round in April and ARC general availability in October.

## Achievements

- Co-founded three companies acquired by Citrix, Dell and Pure Storage.
- Credited with more than 50 issued patents spanning computer networking, storage and security.
- Co-founded Portworx, the subject of Pure Storage’s approximately $370 million acquisition agreement in 2020.

## Latest updates

- **2026-10** — Rao announced general availability of the Agentic Reliability Center (ARC), powering NeuBird’s Production Ops Agent, on October 14.
- **2026-04** — NeuBird announced $19.3 million in funding led by Xora Innovation, bringing stated total funding to $63.8 million.
- **2025-12** — Discussed AI-driven site reliability, context engineering and cross-system collaboration at AWS re:Invent.

## Links

- Website: https://neubird.ai/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gouthamrao/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/goutham-rao
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-10-22