bell-labs
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Ashish Vengsarkar Builds Networks Like Crosswords: One Connection at a Time
At Bell Labs, in startups and at Google, he learned to make light carry more of the world’s traffic. Now the nEye.ai CEO is applying three decades of optical-networking lessons to the physical limits of AI.
Prat Moghe
Prat Moghe is the CEO of Promethium, a Menlo Park data fabric and self-service analytics startup he took over in October 2024 after founder Kaycee Lai moved to Chief Strategy Officer. A UCLA-trained electrical engineer, Moghe started at Bell Labs, ran product and strategy at Netezza through its $1.7B IBM acquisition, founded cloud data-as-a-service company Cazena (later acquired by Cloudera, where he became EVP), and served as president of TiE Boston.
John Serri
John A. Serri is a physicist-turned-entrepreneur and the co-founder, Chairman and CEO of EyeQue Corporation, a Newark, California company that turns an ordinary smartphone into a clinically registered eye-refraction device. With a PhD in Physics from MIT and 35 years spent building secure government networks and one of the world's largest satellite phone systems (Globalstar), Serri launched EyeQue in his 60s to make affordable vision testing available to anyone with a phone. Under his leadership EyeQue built its at-home Personal Vision Tracker on technology licensed from MIT, won CES 2017 Best of Innovation, amassed roughly 25 patents, and reached users in more than 150 countries.
Bill Wells
Bill Wells is the CEO of AMPL Optimization Inc., the Mountain View company behind AMPL, the algebraic modeling language born at Bell Labs that has long been a gold standard for large-scale mathematical optimization. A UC Berkeley-trained mathematician, Wells runs the small but globally influential team that turns business-critical decisions in energy, finance, supply chain, and transportation into solvable models, while steering the company from a classic modeling language toward a modern, API-driven optimization platform.
Mike Zimmerman
Mike Zimmerman is the founder and CEO of Z-Polymers, the Lowell, Massachusetts company behind Tullomer, a melt-spun super polymer marketed as stronger than PEEK and stainless steel yet light enough to print on a desktop 3D machine. A career materials scientist with a PhD in mechanical engineering, he spent nearly 15 years at Bell Labs and Saint-Gobain before founding a string of deep-tech ventures including Quantum Leap Packaging and the solid-state battery company Ionic Materials. He has also taught materials science at Tufts University for more than three decades.
Jennifer Aspell
Jennifer Aspell is the CEO of BrightView Technologies, a Durham, North Carolina optics company that engineers micro lens array films to shape and manage light for displays, AR/VR, automotive, LiDAR, sensing and LED lighting. An electrical engineer trained at Rensselaer, UC Berkeley and Purdue, she started out at Bell Laboratories building technology for long-haul optical networks before moving through Lucent, JDS Uniphase and Tyco Electronics. She took the helm of BrightView in 2010 after the recession gutted its original rear-projection-TV market, and rebuilt it into a global supplier serving more than 200 customers, capped by a $7M Series B in 2025 led by Forvia Hella and Technology Venture Partners.
Arthur Chang
Arthur 'Artie' Chang is the CEO and founder of PanTerra Networks, a cloud-based unified communications company he has helmed since 2001. A serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who started his career at Bell Laboratories and took SoloPoint Communications through an IPO, Chang brings together an engineering pedigree from Northwestern and UC Berkeley with a Stanford Executive MBA. At PanTerra, he has spent over two decades building a bootstrapped challenger to the telecom giants, competing on agility and innovation rather than scale, and now driving the company's AI-powered communications platform, Streams.AI.
Rajesh Swaminathan
Rajesh Swaminathan is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backs bold founders reinventing how the world powers, builds, and heals itself. With two decades of deep-tech investing experience spanning Bell Labs, Deutsche Bank, Applied Materials' venture arm, and now one of Silicon Valley's most storied VC firms, he leads investments across renewables, industrial decarbonization, advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, compute infrastructure, and the intersection of all of these with AI. A chemical engineer by training who was awarded the President of India Medal at IIT Madras and later earned an MBA from Harvard, Rajesh brings rare depth - scientific rigor, financial discipline, and operational empathy - to backing the founders who will, as he puts it, 'save the world.'
Asheem Chandna
Asheem Chandna is a General Partner at Greylock Partners, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture firms, where he has spent over two decades backing category-defining companies in cybersecurity, enterprise software, and AI. Since joining Greylock in 2003, he has never lost capital on a single investment he led - a streak spanning Palo Alto Networks, AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for $3.85B), Rubrik (IPO 2024), Abnormal Security, and Wiz. A Mumbai-raised engineer who cut his teeth at Bell Labs and scaled marketing at Check Point Software from $10M to $550M in revenue, Chandna brings an operator's instinct to early-stage bets, often writing checks before a deck exists. Named to the Forbes Midas List nine times, he is among the most respected cybersecurity investors in the world.
Bill Coughran
Bill Coughran is a Partner and Founder's Coach at Sequoia Capital who spent two decades at Bell Labs - where C, Unix, and C++ were born - before scaling Google's engineering organization from a few hundred to over 10,000 people across four continents. A mathematician by training (Caltech BS/MS, Stanford PhD in Computer Science), he oversaw Chrome, YouTube, Maps, and Search at Google before joining Sequoia in 2011. He is one of Silicon Valley's most seasoned operator-turned-investors, known for his belief in small teams, deep technical rigor, and the kind of coaching that only someone who has actually built the thing can offer.