Anshul is a visionary technology executive driving AI and Cloud Networking innovations. Over the last two decades, he has spearheaded a transformation of the networking industry and led several strategic partnerships with the Hyperscalers.

Previously, Anshul was the Chief Operating Officer at Arista, where he led the team from the very early days, through an IPO and to building a $100B market leader. He led the product roadmap, hardware design, supply chain, global sales, customer engineering and support. As an engineering leader in his early days, he led high-speed switch development at Cisco Systems. An inventor of numerous patents, Anshul pioneered leaf-spine architecture, which is foundational to modern data centers.

He earned an MBA from Wharton and a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Illinois.

Prasad has expertise in silicon and photonics system designs. He is focused on building a world class team delivering customized, high-volume networking infrastructure for AI/ML workloads. In a career spanning 30 years, he has worked on Ethernet and PCIe silicon, low-power DC physical layer links and systems with WDM/Coherent Optics. He has held technical leadership positions at Broadcom and Arista, driving system solutions with co-packaged optics, high-radix switches and coherent optical interfaces.

Prasad has an M.S. from the University of Illinois.

Ryan is responsible for Nexthop’s software development organization.  He was previously responsible for software and hardware co-development projects with hyperscalers at Arista Networks.  There, he built the SONiC and FBOSS teams that delivered datacenter solutions that have been heavily deployed in large scale cloud datacenters.  He has been a speaker at venues like the OCP Summit and Linux Foundation ONE Summit.  He holds 5 patents in networking.

Ryan has a B.S. and M.S. from Stanford University.

At Nexthop AI, Arthi focuses on delivering high quality products & services to our customers with delightful customer experiences. In her 25 years in the industry, Arthi has built and led multiple teams from the ground up including most recently at Google where she established and led the product management org for Google Global Networking (GGN) delivering infrastructure products and process improvements for Cloud, YouTube, Ads, Machine Learning; etc. Arthi has held leadership positions at several startups including Arrcus, Arista, Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco) and began her career at Juniper Networks, where she focused on design, standardization, development and deployment of MPLS. Arthi has successfully launched several products, co-authored numerous IETF drafts/RFCs in MPLS, GMPLS, TE, SRv6 and has been awarded 9 patents through her professional career. 

Arthi has a Masters degree in Computer Science from University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ariff leads the Customer Engineering team at Nexthop that partners with key hyperscalers to integrate technologies that solve modern networking challenges. As an early member at Arista, he helped grow the company’s cloud business and contributed to the foundational designs used in large-scale data center networks (RFC 7938). Previously, at Juniper Networks, he was instrumental in securing and delivering early cloud and mobile networking deployments with some of the largest Cloud & Service Providers.

Ariff has a Computer Engineering degree from the University of British Columbia and is passionate about driving innovation in network infrastructure.

Corrie leads Nexthop’s finance and administration functions, helping to scale the infrastructure necessary to support the company’s growth, customers and employees.  Corrie has a unique background spanning finance and operations at larger public (Quantum/Maxtor) and pre IPO (Infinera) companies before settling into her current role at various technology startups.  Corrie has partnered with many founder CEO’s and investors across the technology sector, building both hardware and software businesses including Skyfire, MindFlash, Elementum and GridX.

Corrie has a B.S Industrial Engineering from West Virginia University and a Master of International Management from Thunderbird.

With over 25 years of leadership experience, Ravi leads supply chain and manufacturing operations at Nexthop. He has deep expertise in leading teams for strategic sourcing, planning, and high-tech manufacturing. He has held several leadership roles at Meta, Google, Apple, and Dropbox and deployed infrastructure at massive scales. Earlier in his career, Ravi worked in business and strategy consulting roles at PRTM(PwC), E&Y, and i2.

Ravi has an undergraduate honors in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT BHU) and an MBA from The University of Texas at Austin.

At Nexthop, Harold drives product design, engineering infrastructure and team efficiency. His proven track record includes successfully scaling and leading high-performing teams at Arista, where he played a pivotal role in delivering industry-leading networking products. He has pioneered an innovative hardware design infrastructure, secured numerous networking patents, and deployed predictive machine-learning models for network failure in hyperscaler datacenter environments.

Harold has degrees from the University of Waterloo, Stanford University, and the Wharton School.

Ms. Brennan served as Senior Vice President, Chief Financial Officer of Arista Networks, Inc., a cloud networking solutions company, from May 2015 to February 2024. Prior to joining Arista Networks, Inc., Ms. Brennan held several key finance roles, including as Chief Financial Officer of QuantumScape Corporation, from March 2014 to May 2015, and as Chief Financial Officer of Infinera Corporation, from July 2006 to February 2014. Prior to that Ms. Brennan held various finance and operations roles at Maxtor Corporation, a leading supplier of high performance storage devices.

Ms. Brennan serves as a member of the Board of Directors for Cadence Design Systems a multinational computation software company, Planet Labs PBC, a leading provider of daily data and insights about Earth, and Lam Research, a global supplier of innovative wafer fabrication equipment and services to the semiconductor industry.

Serving as president and chief executive officer of Vantage Data Centers since 2013, Sureel Choksi is responsible for the company’s vision, strategy and overall leadership in addition to sitting on the board of directors. With nearly 30 years of experience, Choksi is an accomplished leader who has transformed Vantage from a regional data center owner and operator to one of the fastest growing global providers. Choksi’s background is diverse with proven accomplishments across a breadth of disciplines. Prior to joining Vantage, Choksi was an operating executive at Silver Lake Partners and the chief executive officer of Elevation Data Centers. He also previously held several executive roles with Level 3 Communications, including chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, president of wholesale markets, executive vice president of services, group vice president of corporate development and treasurer. He serves on the board of trustees at the Strada Education Network, an education focused, non-profit organization.

Choksi attended the University of Pennsylvania where he received a Bachelor of Science in economics from the Wharton School with concentrations in finance, accounting and entrepreneurial management, and a Bachelor of Applied Science from the School of Engineering and Applied Science.

Guru Chahal is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners focusing on early stage enterprise startups in AI, Security, Cloud Infra, DevOps and Automation. Guru joined Lightspeed after VMware acquired Avi Networks in 2019, where he was a cofounder and focused on Product and GTM. At Lightspeed, he's an investor in category creating companies like Anthropic, Chainguard, Pensando, Noname Security, Descope among others. Guru leverages his founding experience, product expertise and extensive customer network in helping entrepreneurs through funding and beyond. Before Avi Networks, Guru led infra products at Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco).

David A. Maltz is a Technical Fellow and CVP at Microsoft, where he led the Azure Networking team responsible for developing, deploying, and operating the software and network devices that connect all Microsoft's online services, including the Azure Public Cloud, Microsoft 365, and our AI clusters. His expertise includes the network services ranging from Network Security to DNS, the distributed systems that control Microsoft's software defined and physical network, and the SONiC firmware that runs on many of their physical switches. He was a co-designer of the cloud-scale networks and data centers that provide petabits of connectivity at low cost and high reliability, from the optical systems on up.

His past projects include a broad array of hardware and software that improves the usability, performance, and cost of cloud computing and mobile/wireless networking. He founded two venture-funded startup companies in network traffic management and wireless networking, and he has worked in both industry research and academia, including 5 years in Microsoft Research.

Education – Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, 2001. S.B. and S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology 1994.