Leadership Team
Rajesh Shah, CEO
Rajesh Shah is a serial entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience in engineering and business development of semiconductors and systems. His strength lies in identifying and unlocking the optimal value for customers in technology products and services.
Prior to Softnautics, Rajesh Shah started Sibridge Technologies, an IP company which was a pioneer in System Verilog based Multi-Methodology capable VIP, which was acquired by large EDA Company. During the same time, Rajesh as CEO had successfully turned-around Strix Systems, a Wireless Mesh company.
Rajesh started his career as an UltraSPARC design engineer at Sun before leading an ASIC at PipeLinks (acquired by Cisco). In 1999, Rajesh joined as a founding employee of Photuris (acquired by Meriton Networks Inc.). After Photuris, Rajesh founded and managed as CEO, Networking ASIC company, Xpedite Communication (successfully acquired by Multilink Technologies, now part of Micro Semi). In 2003, Rajesh joined as founding employee and had managed the IP and System Solutions group for Open-Silicon, one of the fastest growing fabless ASIC companies in the industry.
Rajesh is an active Angel investor and serves as a board member for multiple companies. He is a graduate from University of Texas Austin alumni with a Masters in Electrical Engineering.
Amit Vashi, COO
Amit Vashi is an executive with over 30 years of experience in engineering and product management within the semiconductor industry. Amit is a decisive and pragmatic executive known for achieving profitable revenue growth.
Prior to Softnautics, Amit was a Vice President of Marketing at QLogic, a Cavium company. At QLogic, Amit played a key role in increasing the company’s revenue by completing 3 major acquisitions. Amit earned the CEO award for integral contributions to QLogic’s acquisition of strategic Ethernet assets from Broadcom. Under Amit’s leadership, the company’s Fibre Channel HBA revenue share grew from 15% to 57%. Amit played a key role in the company’s success by implementing the right product/pricing strategies and applying focused product marketing efforts. Under Amit’s leadership, the company’s 10GbE server ethernet controller/adapter revenue share grew from 0 to 18%. Amit managed a high organizational efficiency and grew product management and marketing organization from 5 to 60 employees.
Amit started his career as an ASIC Design engineer at NCR and continued the same at HP. After HP, Amit worked at Symbios as well as LSI in a pre-sales organization. In 2001, Amit joined QLogic as a Field Application Engineer. Since then, Amit held several responsibilities namely product management, product marketing, program management as well as strategic planning.
Amit holds a Master Degree in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.
Simon Westbrook, CFO
Simon Westbrook brings extensive experience in company-building, operations, and finance. Throughout his career, Mr. Westbrook has been involved in three initial public offerings, two secondary public offerings, and multiple public and private M&A transactions on both sell and buy side and countless rounds of venture capital and angel financing.
He is currently Chief Financial Officer of Softnautics, specializing in financial consulting services. Prior to joining Softnautics, Mr. Westbrook was CFO of Amber Networks, Inc., and the Chief Financial Officer at Sage, Inc. (NASDAQ: SAGI), a Silicon Valley company specializing in flat panel displays. Before joining Sage, Mr. Westbrook held a number of senior financial positions at Creative Technology (NASDAQ: CREAF), a leading PC multimedia company, and Atari Corp (AMEX: ATC), the video game and home computer company both in the USA and overseas. At various times, he has held positions as an advisory board member of the Silicon Valley Financial Executives Institute, and various technology start-up companies where he has assisted in strategic planning, fundraising, and team development. Simon is a Chartered Accountant and holds a Master Degree in Economics from Trinity College, Cambridge University.
Vishal Patil, Head of Engineering
Vishal Patil has more than 20 years of experience in Product Engineering Services with expertise cutting across multiple industry verticals and working on a wide gamut of technologies including Embedded systems, IoT, Cloud computing, Software engineering, and Machine Learning.
Prior to Softnautics, Vishal worked as an Associate Director at eInfochips and responsible for the strategy and roadmap of IoT and AI/ML offerings from Sensors to Cloud for various vertical including Home Automation, Industrial Automation, and Telecom. He helped customers and partners in defining the digital strategy and developing digital transformation roadmaps for the enterprise. He also conceptualization and created Go-to-market strategy plan for new service offerings in IoT/AI/ML technologies.
Vishal started his career as an Embedded Software Developer for Industrial Automation Software development and later took responsibilities that involved Architecting and designing Solutions on verticals including Connected Car, Connected Medical and Home Automation, etc. He has an excellent and consistent track record of repeatedly building global new strategies and teams from scratch and managing the delivery.
He is an Engineering graduate from Pune University and holds a Master’s Degree in Business Administration from Symbiosis International University.
Pravin Desale, Strategic Advisor
Pravin Desale is Senior Vice President of the Appliances and Software-defined (ASDS) Storage Organization at Veritas. In this role, is responsible for defining and delivering product strategy and execution across Veritas’ Appliances (Netbackup, Flex, FlexScale and Access) and High Availability Storage Solutions (InfoScale), Software Defined Storage, and Data Intelligence products.
Pravin is an experienced business leader and 25+ year veteran of the storage industry. He joined Veritas from Seagate Technology, where he was vice president of Flash Solutions Engineering responsible for design, development, and delivery of solid-state drive (SSD) solutions to enterprise, cloud, and client markets for the company. Prior to that, he led Seagate’s Component Platform and Cloud Systems Engineering organization.
Pravin joined Seagate through the acquisition of LSI/Avago, where he led LSI’s flash business, RAID Storage business as Vice president of engineering. Prior to that Pravin spent several years at LSI’s India office to scale up LSI’s India footprint and R&D strategy in APAC. He joined LSI as a part of acquisition of startup Metta Semiconductor where Pravin was a founding member. Prior to Metta, Pravin led engineering teams at Mediamatics, Inc (acquired by National Semiconductor), Parama Networks (acquired by Bay Micro).
Pravin holds a bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Electronics, and Telecommunication from the College of Engineering, Pune, India, and a master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Santa Clara University in California.
