computer-networking
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Eric Chen Put a Computer in the Ceiling - Then Waited for the Edge to Catch Up
After two decades inside networking companies, Eric Chen founded Relay2 around a practical provocation: the Wi-Fi access point already hangs where data is born, so why should every useful computation make a round trip to the cloud?
Relay2 Inc.
Relay2 Inc. is a Milpitas, California networking company that builds Wi-Fi access points with computing and storage baked in. Its patented ServiceEdge Platform and Service Point devices let businesses and managed service providers run applications at the network edge - on-premises, close to where data is created - instead of shuttling everything to the cloud. Founded in 2011 by Eric Chen, Relay2 targets retail, education, manufacturing, transportation and MSPs that want to lower the total cost of deploying enterprise-class WLAN while unlocking new edge services.
Peyman Kazemian
Peyman Kazemian is the co-founder of Forward Networks, a Santa Clara-based enterprise software company that builds mathematically accurate digital twins of complex networks. His PhD dissertation at Stanford - which became the foundational Header Space Analysis framework - won the NSDI 2024 Test-of-Time Award and directly spawned a company now trusted by Fortune 50 enterprises and U.S. government agencies. A graduate of Sharif University of Technology in Tehran and Stanford's electrical engineering department under Prof. Nick McKeown, Kazemian helped develop OpenFlow and SDN before turning his research into a business that has raised over $140 million to transform how enterprises understand, secure, and manage their networks.
David Erickson
David Sterling Erickson is the CEO and co-founder of Forward Networks, a Santa Clara-based company that pioneered the network digital twin. A Stanford PhD in Computer Science and one of the original architects of Software Defined Networking (SDN), Erickson co-founded Forward Networks in 2013 with three fellow Stanford PhD graduates to give enterprises mathematically accurate, real-time models of their networks - enabling visibility, compliance verification, and security posture management across complex multi-vendor environments. Under his leadership, Forward Networks has raised over $140M in funding, achieved 139% ARR growth, and serves marquee customers including Goldman Sachs, PayPal, and Telstra.