Keval Desai is a venture capitalist investing in early stage technology companies that reimagine large consumer habits in Commerce, Media & Transportation. His current portfolio includes companies such as The RealReal, Cuyana, Optimizely, Canva, Grokker, Mapper.ai, Outlier.ai, PeriscopeData and Pipedrive among others. Prior to investing, for 20+ years, Keval held engineering and product management roles in Silicon Valley at companies including Google, Digg, Tandem Computers and Global Village Communication. As an entrepreneur, he was a co-founder of Achex, a venture backed Internet payments startup sold profitably to First Data. Earlier in his career, he got a feel for investing and strategy consulting at ONSET Ventures, Morgan Stanley Venture Partners and McKinsey. He is on the Advisory Boards at UC Berkeley's School of Engineering (CET) and School of Business (Haas), and at the Department of Computer Science at UC Santa Barbara. In 1998, he founded the UC Berkeley Startup Accelerator (now known as "Launch").
Keval holds an M.S. in computer science, a B.E. in electrical engineering and an MBA.