Rajesh Swaminathan

Bio

Rajesh is a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures. Rajesh brings with him two decades of experience assisting and investing in deeptech startups across Semiconductors, Advanced Optics, AI, AR/ VR, Silicon Photonics, Medical devices, 3D Printing and Energy. He is excited about assisting entrepreneurs and driving investments across many of these inflections at Khosla Ventures. Before joining Khosla Ventures, Rajesh served as the Global Head of Applied Ventures LLC, the Venture Capital arm of Applied Materials. At Applied Ventures, Rajesh managed a portfolio of deeptech startups across 13 countries, with >$300M invested across 85 companies. Driven by a strong interest to provide access to deeptech startups with a state-of-the-art manufacturing fab in the US, Rajesh closely worked with the Applied leadership team and the state of New York to establish an $850M Materials Engineering Technology Accelerator (META) facility in NY. Rajesh received Global Corporate Venturing’s (GCV) Powerlist award in 2019. Before joining Applied Ventures, Rajesh worked at the venture arm of Third Point LLC in developing the firm’s venture investment strategy in Cleantech and Semiconductors. Previously, at Lucent’s Bell Labs, he drove the technical assessment of several Optical, MEMS, RF device startups and established successful partnerships with many of them. Rajesh also led the design for reliability program for Lucent’s 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s telecommunication systems and supported the successful deployment of these systems globally. He is excited to see technologies from the optics and semiconductor world playing a crucial role in driving many of the inflections he has been investing into. While pursuing his MBA at Harvard Business School, he worked at Deutsche Bank’s investment banking group in the renewable energy team as a summer intern, and also worked with Khosla Ventures. Rajesh pursued an M.S. from the University of Maryland at College Park, where he worked with the US Navy in developing MEMS devices for defense applications. Rajesh received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering. from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Madras where he was awarded the Shankar Dayal Sharma (President of India) Medal for overall excellence.