cisco-alumni
(3)
Nile
Nile is a San Jose-based Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) company founded in 2018 by former Cisco leaders Pankaj Patel and John Chambers, along with Suresh Katukam and Sri Hosakote. It replaces the traditional buy-and-manage model for enterprise wired and wireless LANs with a cloud-delivered subscription that bundles hardware, software, zero-trust security, AI-driven automation, and performance guarantees. Nile designs, deploys, monitors, and continuously optimizes campus networks so IT teams no longer have to, targeting the roughly $75B enterprises spend each year running networks.
Mehul Bhatt
Mehul Bhatt is co-founder and CEO of FloCareer, an interview-as-a-service HR tech platform that dispatches expert freelance interviewers (plus AI proctoring) to run structured technical screens for enterprises. A former Cisco solutions architect with a Master's from Illinois Institute of Technology, he spent 16 years as an individual contributor before starting the company with Mohit Jain. FloCareer raised a $5.7M Series A in October 2021 and has conducted more than one million interviews for 600+ clients across the US and India.
Casey Bleeker
Casey Bleeker is the co-founder and CEO of SurePath AI, a Denver-based startup that helps enterprises adopt generative AI without leaking their secrets to it. He built the company in 2023 around a simple bet: companies will not choose between banning AI and losing control of their data, so SurePath sits at the network edge, governing what employees send to public models and redacting what they should not. Before founding SurePath, Casey ran CDW's $2B+ Cloud and Cloud Native business and held senior roles at Cisco in AI/ML, IoT, and developer advocacy. He is a computational-biology major turned go-to-market operator who codes his own prototypes, and online he is better known as 'geekbleek.'