ai-networking
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Rochan Sankar
Rochan Sankar is the founder and CEO of Enfabrica, a Silicon Valley startup building networking silicon to move data between the GPUs, CPUs and memory that power large-scale AI. A 26-year semiconductor veteran who ran Broadcom's data center Ethernet switching business before striking out on his own in 2019, he bet the company on a single idea: that AI's real bottleneck is not compute but the plumbing that feeds it. In September 2025, Nvidia paid more than $900 million to license Enfabrica's technology and bring Sankar and much of his team in-house.
Vishal Shukla
Vishal Shukla is the co-founder and CEO of Aviz Networks, a San Jose-based company building an AI-first, vendor-agnostic networking platform on top of the open-source SONiC operating system. A networking veteran with more than 20 years of experience, he previously held leadership roles at Cisco, IBM, Mellanox (NVIDIA), and Nortel. He holds 25-plus granted patents, has authored books on SDN, OpenFlow and OpenStack, and wrote 'Deciding the Future: Building New Networks for the AI Era.' Under his leadership Aviz raised a $17M Series A in November 2024 (roughly $31M total), backed by investors including Cisco Investments and Qualcomm Ventures.
Ed Meyercord
Ed Meyercord is President, CEO, and Director of Extreme Networks (NASDAQ: EXTR), a publicly traded enterprise networking company with 2,700 employees and over $1.1 billion in annual revenue. He took the helm in April 2015 after serving as Chairman of the board since 2011, steering Extreme from a hardware-centric also-ran into a cloud-managed, AI-native networking platform. Under his watch the company now powers the wireless networks at Old Trafford, the Burj Khalifa, Taylor Swift concert tours, and Samsung's global operations, while its SaaS ARR has grown dramatically. Before Extreme, Meyercord ran Talk America (a publicly traded telco), Cavalier Telephone, and Critical Alert Systems, after starting his career as an investment banking VP at Salomon Brothers. He is also known for bringing improv comedy principles into corporate leadership and for his advocacy for people with intellectual disabilities through SKIT Programs.
Sheng Liu
Sheng Liu is the CEO of TeraHop and co-founder of InnoLight Technology (now Zhongji Innolight), a company that commands over half the global market share in 800G optical transceivers. A PhD from Georgia Tech, he returned to China in 2008 to fill a domestic gap in high-end optical modules, built InnoLight into a global leader across 400G, 800G, and 1.6T products, and now leads TeraHop - backed by Temasek and ADIA - to power the optical backbone of AI infrastructure worldwide.
Mansour Karam
Mansour Karam is the founder and CEO of Aria Networks, the AI-native networking company that raised $125M to rethink how GPU clusters talk to each other. A Stanford-trained electrical engineer with a Lebanese-American background, he helped build Arista Networks from a handful of employees to a $4B IPO, then founded Apstra - the company that coined 'intent-based networking' - and sold it to Juniper in 2021. A piano player who names companies after musical terms, Karam has spent 25 years at the bleeding edge of how data moves, and now bets that the network - not the GPU - is the real bottleneck in the AI era.