Unified network security and observability for Kubernetes
Tigera provides unified network security and observability for Kubernetes clusters, and is the creator and maintainer of Calico Open Source, the most widely used container networking and security solution. Our solutions are used by leading companies, including Discover, Chipotle, NBCUniversal, HanseMerkur, Box, Siemens Healthineers, Playtech, Royal Bank of Canada, and Bell Canada.
We prevent, detect, and mitigate security breaches in cloud-native applications
These values lie at the heart of everything we do, and have enabled us to create best-in-class products tailored to user needs, that grow and evolve alongside changing technologies.
Tigera’s story began in 2016 with Project Calico, an open-source networking and security project with an active development and user community. Calico Open Source was born out of this project and has grown to be the most widely adopted solution for networking and security for containers and Kubernetes, powering 8M+ nodes daily across 166 countries.
As adoption of containers and Kubernetes grew and organizations started using Kubernetes at scale, they began to encounter more advanced requirements for observability and security. Tigera responded to this need by building upon Calico Open Source to provide secure networking for containers and Kubernetes.
Tigera was founded by the original Project Calico engineering team. We are committed to maintaining Calico Open Source as the leading standard for container and Kuberentes networking and security, while also offering advanced capabilities through Calico commercial editions to commercial users.
President & CEO
Ratan is responsible for defining strategy, execution and scaling revenues at Tigera. He is an entrepreneurial executive with extensive experience incubating, building and scaling software businesses from early stage to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. He is also a proven leader with a track record of building world-class teams.
Ratan founded and built two SaaS companies, IPTouch and PersonalMD.com. He has also held senior level positions at Actifio, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and SupportSoft. He has an MBA from Santa Clara University, an MS in Computer Science from Louisiana State University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Osmania University.
Chief Financial Officer
Leonora Teng is Chief Financial Officer at Tigera. She is a financial executive with broad experience in all aspects of accounting, auditing, and financial management, and has specifically worked with fast-growing software startups for a number of years. Leonora holds a B.S. in Business Administration from the University of California, Berkeley.
Chief Marketing Officer
As Chief Marketing Officer for Tigera, Utpal is responsible for overall marketing strategy and execution, Utpal brings 20+ years of Marketing and Product Management leadership experience at high-growth start-ups and large companies. Before Tigera, Utpal led marketing at Qubole, helping to scale the company and build a marketing team prior to their acquisition by Idera. Prior to Qubole, Utpal was the Vice President of Marketing at Neo4j where he was instrumental in catapulting Graph Database as the fastest growing database category, driving significant technology adoption and revenue growth. Utpal has a Bachelor in Electrical Engineering and a Masters in Physics from Birla Institute of Technology & Science, Pilani (India) and an MBA from the Wharton School of Business.
Chief Revenue Officer
Fahad is responsible for revenue generation and expansion within our growing accounts. He has experience building sales teams from the ground up as well as scaling those organizations.
Most recently Fahad held sales leadership roles at Centrify where he was the VP of Sales for Central and Western US and had built a global sales team for the cloud business. Prior to Centrify Fahad held various sales leadership roles at companies including Tripwire, nCircle, Datacom Systems, and FireEye. Fahad has an MBA from the University of California, Davis and a BSC in Electrical Engineering from the University of Oklahoma.
Chief Customer Officer
Pervez Sikora has over 25 years of operations, customer support, professional services and engineering experience. This has given Pervez a diverse background that includes entrepreneurship, operations leadership, software engineering and technology management. As Vice President, Services and Customer Success at Tigera, Pervez is responsible for the delivery of professional services and technical support to Tigera’s customers around the world.
Prior to Tigera, Pervez was the Senior Vice President, Global Services and Customer Success at Actifio. Prior to Actifio, Pervez was the Chief Information Officer at Impremedia, where he led the successful migration of over 90% of the technology infrastructure to the cloud. Before Impremedia, Pervez was the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer of Ad2Pro Media Solutions, one of the world’s largest providers of offshore marketing and advertising design services to global media and retail companies.
Pervez holds a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from University of Southern California and a Bachelors degree in Electrical Engineering from Osmania University.
VP of Engineering
Peter Kelly is VP of Engineering at Tigera and Site Leader for Tigera’s EMEA office in Cork, Ireland. He is responsible for all of Tigera’s Engineering teams and operations. Peter has two decades of experience in software development, including recently building control plane technology for open-source proxies at NGINX and later F5 Networks, where he held engineering leadership positions.
Peter has a degree in Computer Science and a Masters in Advanced Software Engineering.
Ratan is responsible for defining strategy, execution and scaling revenues at Tigera. He is an entrepreneurial executive with extensive experience incubating, building and scaling software businesses from early stage to hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. He is also a proven leader with a track record of building world-class teams.
Ratan founded and built two SaaS companies, IPTouch and PersonalMD.com. He has also held senior level positions at Actifio, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and SupportSoft. He has an MBA from Santa Clara University, an MS in Computer Science from Louisiana State University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Osmania University.
Soma joined Madrona in November 2015 and is a Managing Director at Madrona. Prior to Madrona, Soma had a successful twenty-seven year career at Microsoft Corporation including being the Senior Vice President of the Developer Division. Soma has long been an angel investor with investments across a wide range of technology areas both in the U.S. and internationally. At Madrona, he is focusing on Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence, Intelligent Applications, developer centric next-generation cloud platforms and tools, and the emergence of new technologies such as VR/AR. He has authored several pieces outlining Madrona’s thinking about how these technologies will evolve.
Forest Baskett has been with NEA since 1999 and is currently a Special Partner focused on technology investing. He holds board positions at several private companies. Some of his investments that became public companies are Atheros Communications, Audience, Data Domain, Fusion–io and Tableau Software. Prior to NEA, Forest was Senior Vice President of R&D and Chief Technology Officer of Silicon Graphics Inc. Before joining SGI, he founded and directed the Western Research Laboratory of Digital Equipment Corporation. He began his career as a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University. Dr. Baskett received a BA in Mathematics from Rice University, a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.
Aaron Jacobson joined NEA in 2011 and is a Partner focused on investing in entrepreneurs seeking to build, scale and secure the next-generation of SaaS applications, big data platforms, and cloud infrastructure. He serves on the board of Tigera and illusive networks, and is an observer at NGINX, Streamsets, Move Guides, Mimosa Networks, Juvo, and Built Robotics. He has also worked closely with many other NEA portfolio companies including Box (NYSE:Box), Databricks, MapR, UnifyID, Bloom Energy, and Coursera. In 2016 he was named to Forbes Magazine’s “30 under 30” in Venture Capital and the Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “40 Under 40”.
