Ray Grainger

Raymond "Ray" Grainger is the co-founder and CEO of the tech startup Mavenlink, a private cloud-based software-as-a-service (SaaS) company for business management software.

Grainger was born and raised in California. After graduating high school he worked as a field assistant for the National Science Foundation, and took part in two expeditions to the South Pole in 1979. He received an engineering degree from Harvey Mudd College in 1988. After graduating college he worked as an information technology consultant at Accenture, where he remained for 17 years, eventually becoming Global Managing Partner. During these years he invested in several companies, among others in InQuira, which was acquired by Oracle in 2012. In 2005 Grainger left Accenture and became an executive at InQuira, a startup that developes call-center management software. He was an Executive Vice President of the company. After three years he left InQuira to start Mavenlink.

Grainger founded Mavenlink in 2010 and within five years had raised $18 million in venture capital funding. The company is headquartered in Irvine, California. It has four US offices and three international offices. It now has more than 600,000 clients in 100 countries, including Salesforce, Genpact, the Irvine Co. and Stanford University. The company recently completed a $48 million Series E financing round. In July 2019, Mavenlink had around 320 employees.

Grainger is married and has two grown children, a son and daughter. Grainger was a 2017 finalist for Orange County’s Entrepreneur of the Year. He is an emeritus member of the Harvey Mudd College Board of Trustees and chairman of the Finance Committee.