Ajit Gupta

Ajit Gupta was a Silicon-Valley based entrepreneur and the founder of Aryaka, AAyuja, JantaKhoj, and Speedera Networks. He holds 21 technology patents for Internet content delivery and global traffic management. Ajit Gupta is a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee Electrical Engineering Batch of 1984.

Gupta was the founder of Aryaka, a cloud-based WAN Optimization and application acceleration company. Founded in 2009, and headquartered in Milpitas, CA with offices in Bangalore, India, Aryaka employs more than one hundred and fifty people worldwide. Gupta and his team have raised $59.5 million USD in four rounds of funding from InterWest Partners, Presidio Ventures, a Sumitomo Corporation Company, Trinity Ventures, Mohr Davidow Ventures, and Nexus Venture Partners.

Gupta's first successful venture was a company he founded in 1999 – Speedera Networks. Speedera became one of the fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley and in the North American technology industry in five years, as ranked by both Deloitte & Touche and PricewaterhouseCoopers. In 2004, he successfully launched Speedera India in Bangalore to drive the company’s accelerated global expansion. Speedera was acquired in 2005 by Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) for a stock transaction worth more than $500 million one year later.

After Speedera, Gupta founded AAyuja, a technology sales acceleration company, serving as its CEO. He is currently Chairman of the company. Gupta is also the Chairman and Founder at JantaKhoj, an India-based premium background verification service provider, which had also built the first and the largest people search engine on Indians.

Gupta is a notable alumni of the Boys' High School & College (Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh), (BHS), an independent school in Allahabad, India.

Gupta won The Big Idea Award (for the most disruptive business model in the past 12–18 months) at The Innovator Awards 2013. Gupta was recognized by the Golden Bridge Awards for leadership and innovation in October 2012 for launching Aryaka's WAN Optimization as-a-Service offering. Gartner, Inc. recognized his company Aryaka as a ‘Cool Vendor’ for ‘Enterprise Communications and Network Services’ in April 2011.

The company was also named a GigaOM Structure 50 Company in May 2011 and CRN recognized Aryaka as a "Hot Emerging Vendor"in June 2011. Gupta has spoken at conferences around the world, including GigaOM Structure 2011, Cloud Connect, Red Herring, Kagan Digital Media Summits, Datacenter Ventures events, and Streaming Media. A notable alumni of IIT-Roorkee, he is a founding board member of the IIT-Roorkee Heritage Fund.

In 2003, Gupta established a philanthropy program for Speedera called "Giving Back", which provided free Internet infrastructure services to non-profit organizations including Unicef.org, Goodwill Industries International, Autism.org, and the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Under Gupta's leadership, Speedera assisted UNICEF during the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami by providing pro-bono services to enable UNICEF websites to accept contributions and to help victims and families communicate with each other.

• Net Neutrality and CDNs – No level playing field anymore
• Ajit Gupta: How to Compete on Price Without Sacrificing Profitability
• Is The Internet Holding Back BRIC Entrepreneurs?
• 5 Enterprise Cloud and Networking Trends to Watch in 2014
• The Cloud is Revolutionizing the Enterprise WAN
• Why Can’t Mid-Market Companies Have It All?
• The Changing Enterprise WAN in the Era of the Cloud
• How Ajit Gupta's Aryaka Is Disrupting the Wide Area Network Business