Salil Deshpande

Prior to BCV Salil spent seven years as General Partner at Bay Partners, where he invested approximately $85M into 20 companies including Buddy Media (social media marketing platform; acquired by Salesforce.com for close to $700 million in 2012), SpringSource (open source; acquired by VMWare for $420 million), Engine Yard (open source, Platform as a Service), MuleSoft (open source, cloud and enterprise integration), Lending Club (peer to peer lending, invested in the A round at a $25 valuation during the financial crisis;  later trading at a $3 billion valuation and recently went IPO), G2One (open source, Groovy, Grails; acquired by SpringSource), Sonatype (open source, software component management), Jambool (virtual currencies for social graphs; acquired by Google), Covestor (marketplace for emerging hedge fund managers), FantasyBook (fantasy sports apps on Facebook; acquired by Citizen Sports, now part of Yahoo), Triggit (retargeting on Facebook), Dropcam (webcams with cloud DVR; acquired by Google), and Vaxart (oral vaccine platform). Salil also inherited Tealeaf (customer experience management; acquired by IBM) and served on its board for three years prior to its acquisition by IBM. Salil’s angel investments include Philz Coffee (handcrafted cups of love) and Datastax (the Cassandra NoSQL database).

Currently Salil focuses on infrastructure software and open source, such as Typesafe (the Scala language; Akka and Play frameworks for Java), Redis Labs (the Redis NoSQL database), Hazelcast (in-memory data-grids for Java), Aria Systems (ERP for recurring revenue businesses), Iron.io (queues and workers in the cloud), Concurrent (Cascading and Driven), ZeroTurnaround (faster Java redeployments), and DynaTrace (application performance management; acquired by Compuware).

Salil received an MS in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from Cornell University. Salil loves playing sports (both real and fantasy) with his teenage son and enjoys the challenge of trying to convince his teenage daughter that he’s still cool and relevant. For his investment in Buddy Media, Salil got on a Midas List in 2013.