Board of Directors
The Board of Directors consists of venture capitalists and experienced senior executives with successful track records in the memory industry.
CEO/President/Founder/Director
Petro Estakhri co-founded and has served as Chief Executive Officer for Avalanche Technology since August 2006. Previously, Estakhri served as the Chief Technology Officer and chairman of Lexar Media, Inc. which he founded in 1996. Lexar Media was a pioneer in flash memory technology for the digital photography, consumer electronics, and communications markets. It grew from a private startup to the 55th largest company in Silicon Valley prior to its acquisition by Micron Technology, Inc. in June 2006. Prior to that, Estakhri served as the Senior Director of Mass Storage Controller Engineering at Cirrus Logic, Inc after cofounding the group and held leadership positions at IBM and National Semiconductor. Estakhri has served on several Boards, including SiliconStor, a company that Estakhri cofounded in 2002 which was sold to LSI, Apixio Inc. a Health Services provider which was sold to Centene corporation, primaryio Inc. Hybrid Cloud Management and others. Estakhri is a coauthor of more than 120 patents relating to magnetic media, flash storage controllers and systems architecture. Estakhri holds a B.S. and an M.S. in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Davis.
Umesh Padval is a venture partner at Thomvest Ventures in Redwood City, California. He focusses on venture capital investments in cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure. He currently serves on private company boards of Lastline, Clari, Avalanche Technology, Avnera, Tactus Technology, Blue Willow and public company boards of Mellanox and Integrated Device Technology. He has extensive board experience serving on over 20 public and private company boards and several audit, compensation and nominating and governance committees.
Prior to joining Thomvest, Umesh was a successful entrepreneur, investor and CEO of a public company. He most recently worked as an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners office in Menlo Park where he focused on investments in cloud and data center infrastructure, Big data and hardware sectors.
Prior to Bessemer, he worked as an executive vice president at LSI after its acquisition of a public video infrastructure and distribution company, C-Cube Microsystem. At C-Cube, Umesh served as president and CEO and grew the company profitably to over $300m in revenue and 500 employees with a global presence.
Previously he was a board member at Skyhigh Networks(Private,Sold to McAfee),Avnera (Private,Sold to Skyworks),C-Cube Microsystem (Public,Sold to LSI), Entropic Communications (Public, Sold to Maxlinear), Silicon Image (Public, Sold to Lattice), Elantec (Public, Sold to Intersil), Berkeley Design Automation (Private,Sold to Mentor Graphics), Monolithic Power systems (Public), Tilera (Private, Sold to EZ chip) and PA semi (Private, Sold to Apple)
Umesh holds a Bachelor in Technology from Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai and a Master’s degree in engineering from Stanford University. He served on several advisory boards at Stanford University and currently serves on the boards of Palo Alto Medical Foundation and Sutter Medical group.
Chandrasekher is a seasoned global operating and management executive with a track record for delivering innovation. He is an expert on China. And, is recognized as a visionary with the ability to create and exploit disruptions in the marketplace. During his 24 year tenure at Intel Corporation, Chandrasekher held a variety of roles including head of Intel’s mobile business, server and workstation business, global sales organization; and, global marketing. Most recently, he was President of Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies, Inc. and Vice Chairman of Huaxintong Semiconductor, Inc. (China). He is known for his pioneering efforts on the Intel Centrino™ and Atom™ platforms which helped usher in the modern era of mobility; and, for his work on Qualcomm’s Centriq™ARM servers. Chandrasekher presently serves on the board of Avalanche Technology Inc.; and, is a strategic advisor to UPmem, S.A. (processor-in-memory company), Tortuga Logic (hardware based trusted computing company), and, Dimensional Mechanics (machine learning automation company).
Chandrasekher received his Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Cornell University, his Master’s in Operations Research from Cornell University; and, his MBA from Cornell University Johnson Graduate School of Management.
Chandrasekher is a board member on Cornell’s College of Computing & Information Sciences; a member of Cornell’s Trustee Council; and, a charter member at The Indus Entrepreneurs. Chandrasekher was CRN’s “Innovator of the year” in 2004 for the Intel Centrino™ platform; and, was one of the “Top 25 CMO’s” in 2014 by Forbes. He is cited in Steve Hamm’s book “The race for perfect”; and, in Judy Estrin’s book “Closing the innovation gap”. Chandrasekher has also been a visiting lecturer at the Berkeley Haas School of Business.
He lives with his wife and two children in Saratoga, CA.
Don Butler is a Managing Director with Thomvest Ventures. In addition to his work with Avalanche and several other technology companies, Don’s past investments have included Lending Club (NYSE: LC), FlashSoft (acquired by SanDisk), GuardianEdge (acquired by Symantec), and Okena (acquired by Cisco). Prior to Thomvest, Don led the Asian business development efforts for several start-up companies in the software and networking industries as part of his work with Asia Pacific Ventures. He also spent three years as an Analyst with Lehman Brothers, where he worked with clients in the software and semiconductor industries. Don received a B.A. in Chinese from UCLA and M.A.s in both East Asian Studies and Political Science from Stanford University.
Eric Stang is the Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Ooma (NYSE: OOMA). Eric joined Ooma from Reliant Technologies, a medical technology company, where he served as President and CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Prior to Reliant Technologies, Eric acted as Chairman, President, and Chief Executive Officer of Lexar, now a subsidiary of Micron. Under his leadership, Lexar became one of the 50 largest public technology companies in Silicon Valley, before its acquisition by Micron. Eric also serves as Chairman of the board of directors of Rambus (Nasdaq: RMBS) and is a member of the board of directors of Invensense (NYSE: INVN). He is a graduate of Stanford University and the Harvard Business School.
Will Stewart has been an investor and Board Director at Avalanche since 2006. Will started his high-tech career at NEC Corporation Headquarters in Tokyo in 1983 and was involved with the global corporate planning of NEC’s market expansion and systems integration globally.
Following NEC, Will established in 1989 Asia Pacific Ventures (APV), an international business development and venture capital firm specialized in early stage technology cross border investing and business development. APV has invested and assisted over (400) early stage technology companies in the U.S., Japan, Asia, and Europe. APV has secured over $5B in additional growth capital, equity, debt, licensing, public offering, and joint venture investment over the past 29 years. Will Stewart, Founder/CEO has co-established and co- managed five early stage venture capital funds and two venture debt funds.
Prior to co-establishing Rogers Venture Partners, a Silicon Valley corporate venture capital firm, Will was the Co- Founder and CEO of Mezzanine Capital Partners (MCP). MCP specialized in providing venture debt and equity financing to venture backed IT companies.
Will is a Venture Partner at Rogers Venture Partners (RVP), Toronto, Canada and CSV Capital Partners in Shanghai, China. Will has a BA in Economics from St. Anselm College, Manchester, NH and MBA in Finance from Suffolk University, Boston, MA.
In addition, Will Stewart/APV is currently an early stage investor and Executive Chairman of the Board of Xpansiv, as well an early stage investor and Board advisor to Traitware, BrackIT, Hungry Planet, SMJ, Archive Auto, zesty.ai, Relola, TurnTechnologies, Sustainability Partners, Qnext, NXM Labs, and The Elefante Group.
