Masood Pirzada has been a vice-president of strategy and business development and a partner for venture investments at Presidio Ventures, the US-based early to mid-stage corporate venture capital (CVC) subsidiary of diversified Japan-headquartered conglomerate Sumitomo, since 2006.
Pirzada focuses on mobile-related areas – including gaming, augmented reality, artificial intelligence, automotive and robotics – as well as cybersecurity, financial technology and enterprise IT. His investments at Presidio include location-sharing startup Glympse and fabless semiconductor sensor producer MCube.
Pirzada holds board observer positions at Presidio’s portfolio companies such as 3D microelectromechanical system photonic optical circuit provider Calient Technologies, electric vehicle battery technology developer Enevate and human resources software provider Hibob.IO, all of whose investments he led on behalf of the unit.
Many of the portfolio companies he had been involved in have also achieved exits:
- machine learning and artificial intelligence-empowered carrier network and application automation system provider Uhana.IO was acquired by cloud software provider VMware in July 2019,
- chipset technology developer Solantro was acquired by industrial semiconductor provider Huada Semiconductor (HDSC) in September 2018,
- cloud computing platform company Engine Yard was acquired by remote team management services provider Crossover in April 2017,
- container platform operator Deis was acquired by software provider Microsoft in April 2017,
- mobile app development platform Appcelerator was acquired by enterprise software developer Axway for an undisclosed amount in January 2016,
- advanced battery developer Seeo was acquired by industrial conglomerate Robert Bosch in August 2015,
- data centre management technology developer Embrane was acquired by network equipment maker Cisco in April 2015, and
- cloud-based acceleration technology developer Cotendo was acquired by web applications provider Akamai in December 2011.
Prior to joining Presidio Ventures, Pirzada had co-founded BeneSec, a platform focused on mobile payment technologies, in 2007 and led the company as a vice-president of business development for nearly two years.
He was a senior management consultant of technology and business development at IT services firm Computer Sciences for three and a half years from 2002, having been a senior systems engineer at telecommunications equipment maker Lucent Technologies for more than five years since 1997.
Pirzada holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from California State University.
