Former Zynga CIO Debra Chrapaty has taken over as chief executive at Nirvanix, a cloud storage startup backed by Intel Capital, the corporate venturing arm of the chipmaker, and Khosla Ventures.
Chapraty, who became the company’s executive chairwoman in November 2012, becomes Nirvanix’ fifth CEO in six years. The company’s co-founder, Patrick Harr, ran it for two years until being replaced by Jim Zierick, who lasted a year before Scott Genereaux took over when Nirvanix completed its series B in 2010. Genereaux was replaced in early 2013 by Dru Boden, an interim CEO, who has now taken a role as vice president of product and strategy.
Nirvanix, which offers public and private cloud storage, raised $12m in venture funding in 2007 from Mission Ventures, Valhalla Partners and Windward Ventures, before Intel Capital and the European Founders Fund joined the three venture capital firms in an $18m series A later that year. Mission, Windward, Valhalla and Intel Capital then increased their investments three times, in a $5m series B in 2009, a $10m series B in 2010 and a $25m series C in 2012.
Chapraty served as CIO of Zynga, the maker of social media games that listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange in December 2011, where she ran its infrastructure design and technical support. Previously, she worked as the vice president of Cisco’s collaboration services group and as a corporate vice president at Microsoft.
“Being a technology visionary, services guru and innovative infrastructure architect makes Debra the ideal leader to continue to build Nirvanix,” Vinod Khosla, founding partner of Khosla Ventures, said in a press release.