Mansour Karam

CEO and Founder

Mansour Karam is an entrepreneur and executive with a passion and successful track record for building high tech infrastructure companies from the ground up. As CEO and Founder of Apstra, Mansour is responsible in setting the product vision and leading the company’s culture and business.

Prior to Apstra, Mansour was an early recruit at several startups and led critical efforts in various functions: engineering, product management, business development, and sales. In 2000, he joined Routescience as a Principal Architect, where he helped architect the company’s product and led various customer and partner engagements that ultimately resulted in the company’s acquisition by Avaya.

In 2006, Mansour joined Arista Networks as their first business leader, where he worked closely with early customers to define key product requirements and deliver the company’s first product to market. Mansour also developed vertical markets, marketing, sales and partnership strategies and as Arista grew he became head of all global business development and alliances. Arista Networks (ANET) went on to become a public company in 2014 with a $4B valuation.

Due to his close ongoing customer relationships, Mansour identified early the need for change in how networks are built. He was recruited to join the executive team at SDN pioneer Big Switch Networks to help develop the company’s product, business model, and partnership strategy. Mansour holds a portfolio of patents in networking technologies. He has an MS and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a B.S. in Computer & Communications Engineering from the American University of Beirut.

Sasha Ratkovic

CTO and Founder

Sasha is a thought leader in domain abstractions and intent-driven automation. As CTO at Apstra, he drives the architecture direction of the Apstra Operating System and is deeply involved in all aspects of the Apstra Product and Engineering efforts.

Sasha was the first to propose Group Based Policies at Openstack, a year before others adopted the approach and took leadership of the work group. Prior to Apstra, Sasha was a distinguished engineer at Juniper Networks where he led automation efforts for data center products. Sasha holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from UCLA.

David Cheriton

Founder and Chief Scientist

David Cheriton is a Professor of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering at Stanford University and a world-renowned researcher in the areas of networking and distributed systems with numerous widely cited publications and patents, receiving the lifetime achievement award from the ACM Sigcomm professional group in 2003.

David Cheriton has an exceptional track record in identifying big market opportunities and building the architectures needed to address these opportunities. He has mentored dozens of entrepreneurs, founded and invested in numerous widely successful technology companies — e.g. Google, where he was an early advisor to Larry Page and Sergey Brin and among the first angel investors; VMware, where he was an advisor to Diane Greene and was an early angel investor; and Arista, where he was co-founder, Chief Scientist and an investor.

Prof. Cheriton was a Founder of Granite Systems, acquired by Cisco Systems in 1996, serving as a technical advisor at Cisco for 7 years and acting as chief ASIC architect for the Catalyst 4X00 line. He was also Founder and CTO for Kealia, acquired by Sun Microsystems in 2004. Prof. Cheriton received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo in 1978 and he has been at Stanford since 1981.

Manish Sampat

Vice President, Engineering

Sampat is a seasoned strategic leader who brings more than 20 years of experience to Apstra at a time when the company is expected to change the competitive landscape as a pioneer in intent-
based networking.

Prior to Apstra, Manish was at Palo Alto Networks for over six years, where he was vice president of engineering, management software/cloud services. Prior to Palo Alto Networks, he was at Clearwell (acquired by Symantec), Peribit (acquired by Juniper Networks), and Vital Signs Software (acquired by Lucent Technologies).

Manish brings with him extensive experience in the areas of network management, distributed systems, cloud services, and security. He has experience scaling engineering organizations within high growth startup environments. He has extensive hands on experience with different types of software development processes including Agile, Waterfall and hybrid.