Guru Chahal is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners focusing on early stage enterprise startups in cloud, security, DevOps, observability and enterprise IT. He first joined the Lightspeed team in 2012 and then joined the founding team at Avi Networks (one of his investments) to help build out the early stages of the business. Avi Networks was acquired by VMware in 2019. Back at Lightspeed after his time at Avi Networks, Guru leverages his founding experience, product expertise and extensive customer network in helping entrepreneurs through funding and beyond. 

 

During his operational career, he has been part of three product lines as they’ve gone from inception to over a billion dollar run rate. His previous roles include product leadership roles at Avi Networks (next generation application services), Nuova Systems (acquired by Cisco), and Tropos Networks (acquired by ABB). Guru started his career as a software engineer at Cisco Systems, working on distributed systems within networking and holds several patents in the space.