sonic
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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.
Nathan Patrick
Nathan Patrick is the Chief Executive Officer of Sonic, a California-based fiber internet provider that has been challenging the telecom duopoly since 1994. A career network engineer turned executive, Patrick rose through the ranks to CTO before taking the helm as CEO in 2024. He won the 2016 FTTXcellence Award for his technical leadership and has spearheaded Sonic's aggressive expansion beyond its Bay Area roots into Oakland, Los Angeles, and Dallas - backed by the belief that fast, honest internet shouldn't be a luxury.