Tilera
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Board of Directors


Anant Agarwal is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tilera Corporation, a professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT, and a member of the CSAIL Laboratory. His teaching and research interests include computer architecture, VLSI, compilation, and software systems. Dr. Agarwal served as Associate Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) between 1998 and 2003, and is a co-leader of the Oxygen Project. He led a group that developed Sparcle (1992), an early multithreaded microprocessor based on the SPARC architecture, and the Alewife machine, a scalable shared-memory multiprocessor (1993). At MIT's CSAIL laboratory, Dr. Agarwal led the Raw project which developed a tiled multicore microprocessor for instruction level parallelism (ILP) and streams (2002). Anant also led the VirtualWires project at MIT. He has been a founder of several successful start-ups, including Virtual Machine Works, Inc. (1993). Dr. Agarwal won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture in 2001, the Presidential Young Investigator award in 1991, and the Louis D. Smullin Award for teaching excellence at MIT in 2005. Dr. Agarwal holds a Bachelor Degree from IIT Madras and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Rob Chandra is a Managing Partner in Bessemer's Menlo Park office. Since entering the venture capital industry in 1996, he has been involved with 19 early-stage investments that have gone public or have been acquired by public companies. Mr. Chandra is the founding managing partner of the firm's investment practice in China and India. Over his career, Mr. Chandra has helped build companies in a variety of industries. He was involved with communications equipment ventures such as Altiga (acquired by Cisco) and NBX (acquired by 3Com). He has experience with semiconductor investments such as Envoy (acquired by TI), LightLogic (acquired by Intel), Mellanox (IPO), and Mobilian (acquired by Intel). Mr. Chandra has been involved with consumer internet start-ups such as BuyerZone.com (acquired by Reed Elsevier), Direct Hit (acquired by Ask Jeeves), SmarterKids.com (IPO), MotherNature.com (IPO) and Centra (IPO). Prior to joining Bessemer, Mr. Chandra was a general partner with Commonwealth Capital Ventures, which he joined after 10 years of industry experience. Previously, Mr. Chandra spent three years with Accenture working in their San Francisco, London, and then New York offices where he served financial services and high tech clients. Mr. Chandra holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from University of California at Berkeley.

Robert Cohn is an independent investor and advisor to growing companies. He was a partner with Sequoia Capital for 2 years. Prior to becoming a venture capitalist, Mr. Cohn was the founder Octel Communications Corporation (manufacturer of equipment that provided voice mail to corporations and phone companies) in 1982. He was the CEO of the company until it was purchased by Lucent Technologies in 1997, when he became a Executive Vice President at Lucent Technologies. At the time of Mr. Cohn's retirement in 1999, Octel was the worldwide leader in its field with revenues of over $1 billion. Octel was highly acclaimed for its strategy, growth, culture, profitability and leading position in a very competitive market. Prior to founding Octel, Mr. Cohn held positions with McKinsey & Company and Banque Rothschild in France. He has served on various boards of public and private companies such as Trimble Navigation (GPS navigation), Electronic Arts (video games), Ashford.com (high-end online retail), Digital Domain (special effects for commercials and feature films). He is currently on the board of several private companies including Right Hemisphere (3D imaging software), Market Live (e-commerce infrastructure), Adomo (voice mail), and Blue Lithium (internet advertising). Previously, he was a member of the American Business Conference, the Council of Competitiveness, and the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he was also an industry governor in the Data and Communications sector for 5 years. Mr. Cohn served on a CEO advisory board to the Secretary of Defense, William Cohen, from 1997-2000, formed to discuss issues of management reform in the military. Mr. Cohn holds a BS degree in mathematics and computer science from the University of Florida and an MBA from Stanford University.

Hemant Kanakia joined Columbia Capital in 2004 and focuses primarily on technology investments. He was previously founder and CEO of Torrent Networking Technology (acquired by Ericsson), a Columbia Capital portfolio company. Hemant also co-founded and invested in Photuris, Inc. Mr. Kanakia is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Teranetics, Enpirion, and WiNetworks, and is actively involved with Mangrove Systems, Kirusa, and Broadsoft. Prior to joining Columbia, Mr. Hemant served on the Board of Directors of Photuris (acquired by Meriton), Viagate, Price Hawk, Gemplex (acquired by VSNL in 2003), and Torrent Networking Technology (acquired by Ericsson). Prior to starting his first company, Mr. Kanakia worked in AT&T Bell Laboratories (1990-1996) and Tata Consultancy Services, India (1975-1977). Mr. Kanakia received his B.Tech. degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, his M.S. degree from Case Western Reserve University, and his Ph.D. degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Omid Tahernia is President and Chief Executive Officer of Tilera Corporation. Mr. Tahernia has twenty four years of experience in leading organizations providing systems and semiconductor solutions. Prior to Tilera, he spent three years at Xilinx, where he started as Vice President and General Manager of a newly created DSP Division in 2004 and later served as Vice President and General Manager of the Processing Solutions Group consisting of DSP, Embedded and IP Divisions. His responsibilities included the business and product strategy for configurable DSP and Embedded processing. Mr. Tahernia served as a member of the Xilinx Executive team during his tenure there. Prior to Xilinx, Mr. Tahernia spent 21 years at Motorola where he began his career in 1984 and worked in both the equipment and semiconductor segments. In his final role at Motorola Semiconductors, from May 2003 to June 2004, he served as Vice President and Director of Worldwide Strategy and Business Development for the Wireless Group. Prior to that, from 1999 to 2003, he served as Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless and Mobile Systems Division driving a $1B wireless chipset business including baseband and application processors. Mr. Tahernia also held various management positions in the Motorola Paging Group including technology, product development, and licensing. His product management responsibilities included serving international markets of Japan, Asia Pacific and China. Mr. Tahernia was recognized for his engineering excellence and received the Motorola Distinguished Innovator and Patent of the Year awards in 1993 and 1994 respectively. Mr. Tahernia holds 13 U.S. patents, a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and an M.S.EE degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.

Lip-Bu Tan is Chairman and founder of Walden International and has been active in the venture capital industry for the past two decades. Additionally, he introduced and pioneered the U.S. venture capital concept in Asia and contributed towards the promotion of early-stage technology investing in the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to WI, he was Vice President at Chappell & Co. and held management positions at EDS Nuclear and ECHO Energy. Mr. Tan is a board member of Cadence Design, Creative Technology, Flextronics, MindTree Consulting, Sina, SMIC, the National Venture Capital Association, a member of the VC Advisory Board of Fabless Semiconductor Association, a member of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a trustee of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a member of the Committee of 100. He also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of San Francisco for 9 years. Mr. Tan holds a B.S. in Physics from Nanyang University in Singapore, an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco.