Converge Adds Silicon Valley Muscle; Names Anshu Agarwal as General Partner
Cambridge, MA and San Jose, CA – July 20, 2023 – Converge, led by Nilanjana Bhowmik and Maia Heymann — two of the region’s most highly-regarded venture capitalists — today announced the addition of Anshu Agarwal as a General Partner, to launch the firm’s Silicon Valley presence.
In the premier technology market of the world, known for its hyper-competitiveness and winner-take-all attitude, Agarwal built four successful B2B startups as a founding member or early executive, successfully exiting each to a publicly traded company, and leveraged that expertise and network to found her own startup as a CEO, successfully selling it in under three years to a public company.
Ahead of a seismic shift in cloud computing, Agarwal co-founded Nimbella, leading the company as CEO from ideation to exit. Nimbella, a Converge portfolio company, pioneered serverless computing, and was acquired in 2021 by DigitalOcean (NYSE: DOCN). Post-acquisition, Agarwal served as the VP and GM of DigitalOcean’s Serverless & Kubernetes business unit, driving the product adoption to DigitalOcean’s more than 600,000 customers.
From 2000 to 2018, Agarwal was an executive or founding member of four successful Silicon Valley B2B startups: Speedera Networks, a content-delivery-network pioneer acquired in 2005 by Akamai (NASDAQ: AKAM), Ankeena, a high performance media delivery solution acquired in 2010 by Juniper Networks (NYSE:JNPR), ConteXtream, a software-defined-networking and network-function-virtualization pioneer acquired in 2015 by HP (NYSE:HPE), and Cedexis, a cloud infrastructure provider acquired in 2018 by Citrix Systems. At each company, Agarwal oversaw product strategy and product marketing, critical functions that shape new tech markets, and helped drive each company to a successful acquisition by a large public company.
Prior to embarking on her entrepreneurial journey, Agarwal was a leading AI researcher in speech at Motorola Research Labs and her graduate thesis was in neural networks for speech and image recognition.
Startup Experience and VC Know-How Capitalize on Pivotal Industry Shifts
Agarwal’s depth of operational expertise is complemented by Bhowmik and Heymann’s considerable investment prowess. Investing at the earliest stages of B2B company formation in Pre Seed, Seed and Series A rounds, the Converge portfolio includes Chainalysis, a blockchain data platform that raised a Series F round led by GIC valuing the company at $8.6B; BlueConic, a customer data platform majority acquired by Vista Equity Partners; and several other fast growth B2B tech companies including TrustCloud, RevenueBase and Amper.
“When you have the opportunity to work with an A+ player and bring them to your team, you grab it,” said Heymann, Converge General Partner. “Anshu’s rare five times successful startup-to-exit experience makes her a unique partner to the founders we back.”
“As a founder, I had the opportunity to work with Nilanjana and Maia when I started Nimbella. They were a unique firm: they gave me their invaluable support, connections and advice when I needed them – both during the challenging times of Covid, as well as the acquisition opportunities that came our way, while respecting my role as the CEO,” said Agarwal. “Now, as an investor, I am excited to fund companies with them that are disrupting markets and to support founders in their journey through my experience while adding our Valley boots on the ground.”
About Converge
Led by seasoned venture capital veterans and experienced company builders, Converge invests principally in the bi-coastal tech centers of Boston, New York and Silicon Valley, and in select technology markets including Toronto and Israel in early stage B2B technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), cloud and blockchain infrastructure and edge computing, and Robotics.
