Dharmesh Thakker is a General Partner at Battery Ventures, one of the world's longest-running technology venture capital firms, where he leads investments in infrastructure software, AI-powered applications, cloud/DevOps, data, security, and open source. An immigrant from India turned engineer turned VC, he joined Battery in 2015 after leading Intel Capital's global cloud and big-data practice. He holds a BS in electrical engineering from UT Austin and an MBA from Wharton. His portfolio spans category-defining companies including Databricks, Postman, Gong, ClickHouse, and Weaviate, with notable exits including Confluent (IPO), JFrog (IPO), and Sumo Logic (IPO). He hosts the 'Billion-Dollar B2B' podcast, writes for TechCrunch and Forbes, and was named to the Forbes Midas Brink list in 2016.
Dror Nahumi is a General Partner at Norwest Venture Partners, a multi-stage global VC firm managing $15.5 billion in assets. Based in Menlo Park, California, he leads Norwest's Israeli investment portfolio - a practice he helped build since the firm established its Israel presence in 2009. A former Bell Labs research engineer who developed the RCELP speech coder (now the CDMA standard for North American cellular), Nahumi transitioned from deep tech to entrepreneurship before landing in venture capital in 2010. He has backed companies that have been acquired by Microsoft, Google, EMC, and Symantec, and has seeded unicorns including Gong.io, VAST Data, and Weka.