Investor; Founder of Skyhigh Networks, Securent, Confluent, and Micrograam
Dr. Sekhar Sarukkai was most recently a Fellow and Chief Scientist at McAfee. Sekhar joined McAfee through the acquisition of Cloud security company Skyhigh Networks, which he co-founded in 2012 and was SVP and Chief Scientist of. Prior to that, he was Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco Systems where he delivered Cisco’s market leading network access control products, including Cisco’s Identity Services Engine. He joined in 2007 after Cisco’s acquisition of Securent, which he also co-founded and was CTO of. Concurrently, he also co-founded Micrograam to bring micro financing to entrepreneurs in rural India. His first startup, Confluent Software, which he co-founded and was CTO of provided API management and security and was soon recognized and acquired by Oblix under Oracle. Before branching out as an entrepreneur and investor, Sekhar started his career at NASA Ames Research Center where he worked as a computer scientist after obtaining his PhD in Computer Science from Indiana University and later became the chief architect for HP Lab’s market leading web-services initiative (e-speak).
Throughout his career, Sekhar led many impactful and long-reaching initiatives and has received recognitions for his efforts, including the Infoworld Top 25 CTO award, Cisco Pioneer award, and Computerworld Honors Laureate award. Together with his wife Rajashree Sarukkai he established the Sarukkai Social Impact Award in 2020 at UC Berkeley whereis a lecturer with the UC Berkeley School of Information for its Masters in Information and Cybersecurity (MICS) program.
