Board of Directors
Anant Agarwal is the Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tilera Corporation, a professor of Electrical Engineering & Computer Science at MIT, and a member of the CSAIL Laboratory. His teaching and research interests include computer architecture, VLSI, compilation, and software systems. Dr. Agarwal served as Associate Director of the MIT Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) between 1998 and 2003, and is a co-leader of the Oxygen Project. He led a group that developed Sparcle (1992), an early multithreaded microprocessor based on the SPARC architecture, and the Alewife machine, a scalable shared-memory multiprocessor (1993). At MIT's CSAIL laboratory, Dr. Agarwal led the Raw project which developed a tiled multicore microprocessor for instruction level parallelism (ILP) and streams (2002). Anant also led the VirtualWires project at MIT. He has been a founder of several successful start-ups, including Virtual Machine Works, Inc. (1993). Dr. Agarwal won the Maurice Wilkes prize for computer architecture in 2001, the Presidential Young Investigator award in 1991, and the Louis D. Smullin Award for teaching excellence at MIT in 2005. Dr. Agarwal holds a Bachelor Degree from IIT Madras and a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.
Rob Chandra is a Managing Partner in Bessemer's Menlo Park office. Since entering the venture capital industry in 1996, he has been involved with 19 early-stage investments that have gone public or have been acquired by public companies. Mr. Chandra is the founding managing partner of the firm's investment practice in China and India. Over his career, Mr. Chandra has helped build companies in a variety of industries. He was involved with communications equipment ventures such as Altiga (acquired by Cisco) and NBX (acquired by 3Com). He has experience with semiconductor investments such as Envoy (acquired by TI), LightLogic (acquired by Intel), Mellanox (IPO), and Mobilian (acquired by Intel). Mr. Chandra has been involved with consumer internet start-ups such as BuyerZone.com (acquired by Reed Elsevier), Direct Hit (acquired by Ask Jeeves), SmarterKids.com (IPO), MotherNature.com (IPO) and Centra (IPO). Prior to joining Bessemer, Mr. Chandra was a general partner with Commonwealth Capital Ventures, which he joined after 10 years of industry experience. Previously, Mr. Chandra spent three years with Accenture working in their San Francisco, London, and then New York offices where he served financial services and high tech clients. Mr. Chandra holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from University of California at Berkeley.
Phil Herget joined Columbia Capital in 1992 and focuses primarily on media and communications investments, both services and technologies. He is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Avail Media, Hatteras Networks, Hillcrest Laboratories, and Imagine Communications. Former Columbia portfolio companies that Phil managed include Altiga Networks (acquired by Cisco Systems), Call Technologies (acquired by 3Com), Columbia Spectrum Management (acquired by P-Com), NMP (acquired by AppNet / Commerce One), Ocular Networks (acquired by Tellabs), Riverbed Technologies (acquired by Aether Systems), Saville Systems (NASDAQ: SAVLY subsequently acquired by ADC Communications), Taqua (acquired by Tekelec), Telular (NASDAQ: WRLS), and Torrent Networking Technologies (acquired by Ericsson). In 1993, Phil joined Telular Corporation as its Chief Financial Officer where he led the company through an initial public offering, returning to Columbia Capital in 1994. Prior to joining Columbia Capital, he served in various financial management positions for Energy Service Company, Energy Insurance International, Marsh & McLennan, and Lloyd's of London broker C.T. Bowring & Co. in London, England. Phil received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his M.B.A. from Kenan-Flager Business School at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Omid Tahernia is President and Chief Executive Officer of Tilera Corporation. Mr. Tahernia has twenty four years of experience in leading organizations providing systems and semiconductor solutions. Prior to Tilera, he spent three years at Xilinx, where he started as Vice President and General Manager of a newly created DSP Division in 2004 and later served as Vice President and General Manager of the Processing Solutions Group consisting of DSP, Embedded and IP Divisions. His responsibilities included the business and product strategy for configurable DSP and Embedded processing. Mr. Tahernia served as a member of the Xilinx Executive team during his tenure there. Prior to Xilinx, Mr. Tahernia spent 21 years at Motorola where he began his career in 1984 and worked in both the equipment and semiconductor segments. In his final role at Motorola Semiconductors, from May 2003 to June 2004, he served as Vice President and Director of Worldwide Strategy and Business Development for the Wireless Group. Prior to that, from 1999 to 2003, he served as Vice President and General Manager of the Wireless and Mobile Systems Division driving a $1B wireless chipset business including baseband and application processors. Mr. Tahernia also held various management positions in the Motorola Paging Group including technology, product development, and licensing. His product management responsibilities included serving international markets of Japan, Asia Pacific and China. Mr. Tahernia was recognized for his engineering excellence and received the Motorola Distinguished Innovator and Patent of the Year awards in 1993 and 1994 respectively. Mr. Tahernia holds 13 U.S. patents, a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University, and an M.S.EE degree from Georgia Institute of Technology.
Lip-Bu Tan is Chairman and founder of Walden International and has been active in the venture capital industry for the past two decades. Additionally, he introduced and pioneered the U.S. venture capital concept in Asia and contributed towards the promotion of early-stage technology investing in the Asia-Pacific region. Prior to WI, he was Vice President at Chappell & Co. and held management positions at EDS Nuclear and ECHO Energy. Mr. Tan is a board member of Cadence Design, Creative Technology, Flextronics, MindTree Consulting, Sina, SMIC, the National Venture Capital Association, a member of the VC Advisory Board of Fabless Semiconductor Association, a member of the Visiting Committee for the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a trustee of Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, and a member of the Committee of 100. He also served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the University of San Francisco for 9 years. Mr. Tan holds a B.S. in Physics from Nanyang University in Singapore, an M.S. in Nuclear Engineering from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and an M.B.A. from the University of San Francisco.
In The News
Testimonials
- "Tilera's approach of implementing a parallel array of full featured processors with a unique interconnect mechanism enhances the heterogeneous architectures we employ today. TILE64 is well suited for tasks needing a higher degree of parallelism than can be achieved with traditional microprocessors.”
Scott Parsons
Chief Scientist and Chief Architect, Exegy













