Ankur Prakash is a partner at Liberty Global Ventures, the CVC arm of telecommunications and media company Liberty Global. He is entering his second decade at the firm and has made an outsized impact in the areas of mobility, cloud, enterprise software, core infrastructure and artificial intelligence.
Prakash loves to work with founders who have a bold vision to disrupt large markets. Some of his notable investments include – Arrcus, Aviatrix, Awake Security (ANET), Guavus (Thales), Lacework, Mindmeld (CSCO), Plume, Pensando (AMD), Tibit (CIEN) and Versa Networks. As an active and early investor, Prakash works closely with founders as they navigate product market fit and scale go-to-market.
“We are entrepreneur first and are fully committed to helping our founders build exceptional companies.”
“At Liberty Global Ventures, we have been investing in startups for 15 years and are both strategic and financial investors,” says Prakash.
“While we are a corporate-backed venture firm, we are entrepreneur first and are fully committed to helping our founders build exceptional companies. We are active investors and along with the capital we bring a strong network of senior industry leaders across Europe. We are small team of four partners and operate as a startup ourselves.”
A Silicon Valley veteran, Prakash has held leadership roles in engineering, product management and strategy functions at various companies including Cisco, Alcatel-Lucent and Juniper Networks. Prior to Liberty Global, Prakash was at Juniper where he was responsible for Juniper’s routing infrastructure platform. As part of Juniper’s venture investment team, he also worked on the investments in Violin Memory (VMEM), and FireEye (FEYE). In 2003, Prakash was a founding engineer at NetDevices, where he led the development of industry’s first converged gateway product for mid to large enterprises. NetDevices was acquired by Alcatel-Lucent in 2006, and Prakash led the engineering and development of the Alcatel’s access products portfolio.
Prakash holds an MBA from Kellogg School of Management, a MS in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University, and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the IIT Kanpur, India.
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