About Aisera

Muddu Sudhakar is a successful Entrepreneur, Executive and Investor. Muddu has deep product, technology and GTM experience plus knowledge on enterprise markets including Cloud, SaaS, AI/Machine learning, IoT, Cyber Security, Big Data, Storage and chip/Semiconductors. Muddu brings strong operating experience with startups as CEO (Caspida, Cetas, Kazeon, Sanera, Rio Design) and in public companies such as SVP & GM role at ServiceNow, Splunk, VMware, and EMC. Sudhakar holds a Ph.D. and MS in Computer Science from the University of California, Los Angeles and a BS in Electronics & Communications Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is widely published in industry journals and conference proceedings and owns more than 40 patents.

Dr. Christos Tryfonas is a successful serial entrepreneur and technologist in Silicon Valley. Currently, he is the Chief Architect at Aisera, focusing on technology, engineering, and strategy. Most recently, Dr. Tryfonas was the Founder and CTO of Caspida, a next-generation, predictive cybersecurity enterprise software company that detects and prevents hidden threats. Following Caspida’s acquisition by Splunk, Dr. Tryfonas served as Head of Engineering for Splunk Behavioral Analytics. Before that, he co-founded Cetas, a cloud analytics and big data company acquired by VMware. He was also a founder of Kazeon Systems, which was acquired by EMC Corp. Dr. Tryfonas holds multiple issued and pending patents with widely published work throughout both academia and industry.

Antonio Nucci, Ph.D., serves Aisera as Chief Technology Officer (CTO), working with the leadership team to set Aisera’s strategic technology direction and shape product and market strategy. Prior to Aisera, Antonio was CTO at Cisco’s Customer Experience (CX) Group, helping develop ML and AI capabilities critical to Cisco’s digital transformation. Prior to that, Antonio served as VP and Chief Data Scientist at Symantec Corporation, and Senior Director of Advanced Technologies and AI at Boeing. Antonio has been honored as Infosecurity CTO of the Year, among many distinctions. He holds 83 USPTO patents and has authored over 100 technical papers and co-authored six technology books. He earned his Bachelors, Masters, and Ph.D. in Computer Science at Politecnico di Torino (Italy).

Kim brings to Aisera a career spanning 22 years in leading, strategizing, and delivering successful go-to-market initiatives. She spearheaded global teams in driving rapid adoption of first-to-market technologies, resulting in sustained demand and revenue growth. Prior to Aisera, Kim held marketing leadership roles at Area 1 Security, CloudPhysics, Ixia, Net Optics, Avocent, and Cyclades. Kim earned her BS in Psychology from the University of California, Davis, with a minor in Rhetoric and Communications. Outside of work, Kim enjoys exploring and traveling to new destinations while learning about diverse cultures, languages, and everything the world has to offer. She serves as an advisor to startups in cybersecurity and emerging technologies.

Marty Riley brings deep experience and dynamic achievement to his position as Aisera’s Vice President, Sales. Most recently, he led an AppDynamics sales team comprising 14 reps and two Regional Directors. Prior to that, he served as Regional Director for the AppDynamics Northwest and Rocky Mountain regions, helming a team of six reps. In both positions he earned President's Club honors and helped drive AppDynamics subsequent acquisition by Cisco. Additional wins include helping Good Technology grow into its successful acquisition by Blackberry and iPass achieve IPO stature. Marty enjoys playing basketball and tennis, attending live music concerts, and spending time with his seven nieces and nephews.

Puru Amradkar brings over 20 years of extensive experience in building scalable, distributed cloud services. At Aisera, Puru leads the product and sales engineering teams with the belief that an alliance between products and technical sales leads to great products and synergy. He has held leadership positions at Microsoft, where he was involved in the buildout of OneDrive, Outlook.com and Microsoft Azure. Most recently he led Product Management at ServiceNow for their ITOM business unit. Puru holds over 45 USPTO patents and has participated in multiple industry meetups as a guest speaker. He has a passion for music and enjoys classical Indian dance from folk to modern free form expression.

Chinna Polinati brings over 24 years of experience architecting, building, and running Internet-scale cloud services. He held multiple engineering leadership positions at Microsoft building platform services for products like OneDrive, Messenger, and Xbox Live. Before Aisera, Chinna was the Sr. Director of Product and Engineering within ServiceNow’s ITOM Business Unit. He played a key role in incubating the AIOPs product and expanding CMDB functionality. He holds multiple patents in areas like cloud scalability, monitoring, CMDB, and more. Beyond work, Chinna has summited three out of five volcanoes in Washington. He is also planning to run a half-marathon and participate in the annual Seattle to Portland cycling event.

Utkarsh Contractor serves as the VP of AI at Aisera, where he leads data science and ML engineering teams working on critical machine learning and artificial intelligence applications in the fields of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and classical ML. He pursued graduate studies at Stanford University where his research was focussed in the fields of NLP and reinforcement learning. Utkarsh brings over 15 years of industry experience in information retrieval and machine learning. He has held leadership roles at companies such as LinkedIn and AT&T Labs, and he holds several patents in the field of AI and ML. Outside of work Utkarsh loves to spend his time playing football and going for long runs.

Anthony Palladino joins Aisera bringing 20-plus years of experience in leading go-to-market functions across service, systems, and operations management, as well as big data and DevOps. Most recently, Palladino served as Senior Vice President of Worldwide Sales and Field Operations at CloudBees, where he grew the open-source business more than 300 percent. Prior to that, Palladino led the Americas division at Splunk, starting pre-IPO and progressing through $1 billion in revenue. He holds degrees in Economics and Honors from Villanova University; and he has created and taught multiple programs and workshops on sales process, customer success, people development, culture, and leadership. Palladino is an advisor to, and investor in multiple startups. When not engaging with customers or the Aisera Team, you can likely find him on the water or enjoying family time with his wife of 22 years, Paula, and their children, Michael and Daniella.