__NOTOC__ Ajit Gupta was a Silicon-Valley based entrepreneur and the founder of Aryaka, AAyuja, JantaKhoj, and

Speedera Networks Speedera Networks, founded in 1999, was a content delivery network (CDN) company that emerged in the late 1990s to advance technology applications for Internet communications and collaboration and became the first CDN to turn a profit. On June, 2 ...

. He holds 21 technology patents for Internet content delivery and global traffic management. Ajit Gupta graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee in Electrical Engineering Batch of 1984. Ajit Gupta died on October 7, 2016. He was survived by his wife (also an IIT-Roorkee graduate) and two children.

Career

Gupta was a 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 Bangalore (), officially Bengaluru (), is the capital and largest city of the Indian state of Karnataka. It has a population of more than and a metropolitan population of around , making it the third most populous city and fifth most ...

, 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 Mohr may refer to: Places * Mohr, Fars, a city in Iran * Mohr County, an administrative subdivision of Iran * Mohr Rural District, an administrative subdivision of Iran Science and math * Mohr's circle, two-dimensional graphical representati ...

, and Nexus Venture Partners. Gupta's first successful venture was a company he co-founded in 1999 -

. Speedera was acquired in 2005 by

Akamai Technologies Akamai Technologies, Inc. is an American content delivery networkJ. Dilley, B. Maggs, J. Parikh, H. Prokop, R. Sitaraman, and B. Weihl. (CDN), cybersecurity, and cloud service company, providing web and Internet security services. Akamai's Inte ...

(NASDAQ: AKAM). After Speedera, Gupta founded AAyuja, a technology sales acceleration company, serving as its CEO. He was Chairman of the company. Gupta was 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 was a notable alumni of the

Boys' High School & College (Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh) , motto_translation = Do not judge a man by his face but by his deeds , established = , type = Private , address = 4, Purushottam Das Tandon Road , region = Civil Lines, Allahabad , state ...

, (BHS), an independent school in Allahabad, India.

Honors

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. Gartner, Inc is a technological research and consulting firm based in Stamford, Connecticut that conducts research on technology and shares this research both through private consulting as well as executive programs and conferences. Its client ...

recognized his company Aryaka as a ‘Cool Vendor’ for ‘Enterprise Communications and Network Services’ in April 2011. The company was also named a

GigaOM Gigaom is a technology focused analyst firm and media company. The company evolved from a blog which offered news, analysis, and opinions on startup companies, emerging technologies, and other technology related topics. It was started by Om Malik ...

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

Structure 2011, Cloud Connect, Red Herring, Kagan Digital Media Summits, Datacenter Ventures events, and

Streaming Media Streaming media is multimedia that is delivered and consumed in a continuous manner from a source, with little or no intermediate storage in network elements. ''Streaming'' refers to the delivery method of content, rather than the content it ...

. A notable alumni of IIT-Roorkee, he is a founding board member of the IIT-Roorkee Heritage Fund.

Philanthropy

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 Goodwill Industries International Inc., often shortened in speech and writing to Goodwill (stylized as goodwill), is an American nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization that provides job training, employment placement services, and other community-bas ...

, Autism.org, and the St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. Under Gupta's leadership, Speedera assisted

UNICEF UNICEF (), originally called the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund in full, now officially United Nations Children's Fund, is an agency of the United Nations responsible for providing Humanitarianism, humanitarian and Devel ...

during the

2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami An earthquake and a tsunami, known as the Boxing Day Tsunami and, by the scientific community, the Sumatra–Andaman earthquake, occurred at 07:58:53 local time (UTC+7) on 26 December 2004, with an epicentre off the west coast of northern Suma ...

by providing pro-bono services to enable UNICEF websites to accept contributions and to help victims and families communicate with each other.

References

External links

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

External links

aryaka.com

aayuja.com

jantakhoj.com

{{DEFAULTSORT:Gupta, Ajit 1961 births 2016 deaths American people of Indian descent American computer businesspeople IIT Roorkee alumni