# Issac Roth

> Issac Roth is a Silicon Valley founder, operator and investor who has spent 25-plus years turning hard infrastructure into products developers actually use. He created Red Hat OpenShift out of his startup Makara, was founding CEO of the Node.js company StrongLoop (acquired by IBM, where he became a cloud CTO), and invested as a Venture Partner at Shasta Ventures. Today he is co-founder and CEO of Orama, an open-source search and answer-engine company building a fourth-generation database that fuses full-text search, vector search and built-in LLMs to power AI agents and copilots.

- **Role:** Co-Founder & CEO at Orama
- **Organizations:** Orama, Shasta Ventures, LeakSignal, IBM, StrongLoop, Red Hat, Makara, Cisco Systems, Wily Technology
- **Nationality:** American
- **Education:** Degree in Multimedia Design & Technology, Stanford University
- **Known for:** Created Red Hat OpenShift, one of the first major platform-as-a-service offerings, out of his startup Makara., Founding CEO of StrongLoop, a central commercial backer of the Node.js ecosystem (acquired by IBM)., Served as a CTO at IBM for API Management and Hybrid Cloud Integration after the StrongLoop acquisition.

## Career timeline

- **1990s** — Networking software engineer at Cisco Systems; early member of Wily Technology, whose alumni went on to found New Relic and AppDynamics.
- **2008** — Founded Makara, a cloud platform-as-a-service startup, as co-founder and CEO.
- **2010** — Makara acquired by Red Hat; Roth stayed on to create and scale Red Hat OpenShift, serving as 'Red Hat PaaS Master' through 2013.
- **2013** — Incubated core Node.js contributors at Shasta to form StrongLoop and became founding CEO.
- **2015** — StrongLoop acquired by IBM; Roth became CTO for API Management and Hybrid Cloud Integration at IBM.
- **2019** — Joined Shasta Ventures as Venture Partner / Managing Director, co-building the GTM accelerator Elevate.
- **2023** — Co-founded Orama and became CEO, focused on open-source AI-native search and answer engines.
- **2025** — Presented 'OramaCore: A Search Database with LLMs Built-In' at Data Council (DC25).

## Achievements

- Created Red Hat OpenShift, one of the first major platform-as-a-service offerings, out of his startup Makara.
- Founding CEO of StrongLoop, a central commercial backer of the Node.js ecosystem (acquired by IBM).
- Served as a CTO at IBM for API Management and Hybrid Cloud Integration after the StrongLoop acquisition.
- Built and exited multiple enterprise software companies (Makara to Red Hat, StrongLoop to IBM).
- As an investor at Shasta Ventures, backed companies including Scalyr, Apteligent, Beautiful.ai, CodeFresh, Outerbounds and Voxel51.
- Early angel investor in CircleCI, Cloudability, Cloud9 (acquired by Amazon) and others.
- Co-founded LeakSignal, a security/observability company.
- Leading Orama's open-source search engine and the OramaCore AI-native database runtime.

## Latest updates

- **2023-06** — Co-founded Orama and became CEO, leading an open-source AI-native search company.
- **2025** — Presented OramaCore, a search database with LLMs built in, at Data Council (DC25).

## Links

- Website: https://orama.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/issacroth/
- GitHub: https://github.com/oramasearch

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/issac-roth
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-06-24