Board of Directors

Akros Silicon’s board of directors has extensive experience in building high-growth companies that deliver industry-leading products.

 

Syrus P. Madavi, Chairman of the Board
President, SPM Capital

Mr. Madavi has over 20 years of executive-level experience in analog, mixed-signal, and DSP Integrated circuit semiconductor products.  Currently, Mr. Madavi is the President of SPM Capital, a private investment firm focusing on the semiconductor industry. Previously, he managed a number of high-technology companies including as Chairman, President and CEO of Burr-Brown Corporation, a provider of high-performance analog and mixed-signal ICs;  as Director, President and Chief Operating Officer of JDS Uniphase: and as SBE Senior Vice President of the high-performance analog business sector of Texas Instruments. In addition, Mr. Madavi managed other businesses as President of Raytheon Semiconductor and Vice President and General Manager of Honeywell's Signal Processing Technologies. His other employment includes engineering and marketing positions with General Electric and Analog Devices. 

Mr. Madavi holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.S in Computer Science, both from Stevens Institute of Technology, as well as an M.B.A. in Finance from UCLA.

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Chris Rust, Director
General Partner, U.S. Venture Partners

Christopher Rust (rust@usvp.com) is a Partner at U.S Venture Partners, and joined the firm in 2004.  Chris focuses on information technology investments.  Prior to USVP, he was the Chief Executive Officer at Mahi Networks (acquired by Meriton Systems) from 2002 to 2004, and a Partner at Sequoia Capital from 1998 to 2002.  Chris held a variety of operating roles in engineering and product line management from 1987 to 1998, including co-founder and principal network architect at Time Warner Roadrunner; now one of the largest residential broadband service providers in the U.S.  Chris is currently a Director of Accelops, Akros, Clustrix, Diablo, Exablox, Kaiam, and PlumGrid.  Chris is also an active Board Observer of GoPro and Zerto.  Previously, he was a founding Director or lead investor in the following: Abrizio (acquired by PMC Sierra); Afara WebSystems (acquired by SUN Microsystems, now the silicon powering the Oracle Exadata product line); Avanex (Nasdaq: AVNX); Commerce5 (acquired by Digital River); Dune Networks (acquired by Broadcom); LVL7 Systems (acquired by Broadcom); Mellanox (Nasdaq: MLNX); Nexsi (acquired by Juniper Networks); SwitchOn Networks (acquired by PMC Sierra); Santur (acquired by Neophotonics); Stratalight (acquired by Opnext); Syndesis (acquired by Subex Azure); Telera (acquired by Alcatel Lucent); Veriwave (acquired by Ixia); and VxTel (acquired by Intel Corporation). He has been a Director of the Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), was a founding member of the Cable Labs DOCSIS cable modem standards body, and has been a contributor to the ADSL and ATM forums. Chris earned a B.S.E.E. and M.S.E.E. from the University of Lowell, an M.S. Telecommunications Engineering from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and an M.E. Engineering Management from the University of Colorado, Boulder.

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Pascal N. Levensohn, Director
Founder and Managing Director
Levensohn Venture Partners

Pascal Levensohn has been a finance professional since 1981 and a venture capitalist since 1996, when he founded Levensohn Venture Partners (“LVP”) in San Francisco.  He focuses on investing in early stage software, semiconductor, and communications companies that are experiencing revenue acceleration. Mr. Levensohn founded and chairs the venture capital industry Working Group on Director Accountability and Board Effectiveness and has published numerous articles on venture capital trends with a particular emphasis on best corporate governance practices in the boardroom.  He received a BA in Government from Harvard University,  is a graduate of the Lawrenceville School, and is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.  Mr. Levensohn also serves on the boards of Consolidated IP Holdings, Reconnex, Ubicom, and Veraz Networks.

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Marc Van den Berg, Director
General Partner
Technology Partners

Marc joined Technology Partners in 2012. He focuses on Cleantech, investing in Energy Technology, Water Technology, and Advanced Materials opportunities.

Marc's investing career began early last decade where he was most recently a Managing Director at Vantage Point Capital from 2006-2012. Prior to his venture capital career Marc spent 25 years in executive leadership positions at venture backed startups in Silicon Valley that included stints in high energy Excimer lasers, advanced oxidation water purification, semiconductor capital equipment and electronic materials. Marc was GM/VP at Advanced Materials Company, ATMI from 2001-2005 where he ran a global business in the electronic materials marketplace. From 1995 to 2002 Marc was VP of Engineering at Microbar Inc., a semiconductor lithography chemical company with a rich portfolio of advanced water treatment and advanced electroplating equipment products. In the early 1990's Marc joined garage start-up Purus Inc., an advanced oxidation water purification company in the heart of Silicon Valley as Director of Engineering and a member of the executive management team. During the decade of the 80's Marc spent his early engineering career with XMR Inc., developing UV laser systems for use in the semiconductor, military, medical and automotive fields.

Marc enjoys assisting entrepreneurs in their quests to grow exciting new companies.

Marc is a graduate of Santa Clara University with a degree in Electrical Engineering and is active at SCU as a director in the Engineering School and the Center of Innovation and Entrepreneurship in SCUs business school.

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Elie Antoun, President & CEO, Director 

Mr. Antoun joins Akros Silicon with 30 years of experience in the semiconductor industry.  Most recently, he was president & CEO of AccelOps, Inc from April 2011 to December 2012.  AccelOps is a software start-up that delivers a real-time multi-domain monitoring solution for network infrastructures and data centers.  During his time at AccelOps, Mr. Antoun stabilized the company, recruited an executive team and raised a large funding round to drive the company’s growth.

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Sajol Ghoshal, Director
Office of CTO, Co-Founder, Akros Silicon

Mr. Ghoshal was previously Chief Operating Officer at Calpont Corp., a development-stage company specializing in hardware database systems, where he was responsible for engineering, operations, worldwide sales, product marketing and applications support. At Calpont, he engaged key alpha development partners such as FedEx, Acxiom, NCR/Teradata and Business Objects.

Prior to Calpont, he was Vice President of Engineering of Agere Inc. in Austin, TX. Agere Inc. was acquired by Lucent in 2000. Mr. Ghoshal was instrumental in delivering the industry’s first 2.5/10Gigabit/s Network Processor on TSMC 0.13u process. Before Agere, he worked for 13 years at Level One Communications, where he served as Director of Engineering of the WAN Access Division.

Mr. Ghoshal has 21 years of experience and holds an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of 7 patents.

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Irwin Federman, Observer
General Partner, U.S. Venture Partners

Irwin Federman, who joined USVP as a General Partner in April 1990, was President and CEO of Monolithic Memories, Inc. from 1978 to 1987. MMI was a startling turnaround. Under Irwin's leadership, the Company grew from virtual bankruptcy to $250 million in revenues during his nine-year tenure as CEO. After becoming a public company, MMI merged with AMD, of which Irwin became Vice Chairman. Irwin was also two-term Chairman of the Semiconductor Industry Association, has served on the Board of Directors of the National Venture Capital Association and served two terms on the Dean's Advisory Board of Santa Clara University.

As CEO at Monolithic Memories, Irwin initiated MMI investments in such highly successful venture capital start-ups as Altera, Cypress Semiconductor and Xilinx. As a professional venture capitalist, Irwin was a founding or lead investor in Blue Martini, Check Point Software Technologies, Centillium Communications, Crescendo Communications, MMC Networks, NeoMagic, Netro, Nuance Communications, QuickLogic, SanDisk, and TelCom Semiconductor.

Irwin has been the founding or lead investor in a number of high-potential, high-profile early-stage venture capital investments, including BeVocal, ON24, and Mellanox, among others. He has been the recipient of the Anti-Defamation League's Torch of Liberty Award and the Brotherhood Award from the National Conference of Community and Justice. In 2004, Irwin was inducted into Junior Achievement's Silicon Valley Hall of Fame. Irwin received a B.S. in Economics from Brooklyn College and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Engineering Science from Santa Clara University.

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Steve Reale, Observer
General Partner, Levensohn Venture Partners

Steve Reale joined LVP in October 2000 and is focused on enterprise software, communications and semiconductor technologies. He is also actively researching the clean-tech investment space. Steve joined LVP from ZuluSports.com, an Internet-based adventure sports portal, where he was an early employee and Director of Finance. Prior to ZuluSports, Steve held a variety of equity research positions at Robertson Stephens, Van Kasper & Company and JP Morgan, covering a broad range of industries including outsourced financial processors, business services, environmental technologies and services, and retailing.

Since joining LVP, Steve has done significant project work for numerous LVP portfolio companies. He has often led or assisted projects in business development, product marketing, strategic direction and financial exercises. Steve currently serves as a board member at Consolidated IP Holdings (CIPH) and as an unofficial board observer at Akros Silicon, BigFix, BroadLogic, Capella, Levanta, and Ubicom.

Steve is a graduate of Middlebury College, where he received a BA in International Politics/Economics and Japanese. He is a Chartered Financial Analyst. 

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Nelson C. Chan, Director
 
Mr. Chan served as Chief Executive Officer of Magellan, a leader in consumer, survey, GIS and OEM GPS navigation and positioning markets, from 2006 to 2008.  At Magellan Mr. Chan more than doubled annual revenues from $200 million to over $500 million and turned the business profitable in 12 months.  Magellan was successfully sold to Mitac Corporation.  From 1992 through 2006, Mr. Chan served in various senior management positions with SanDisk Corporation, the world's largest supplier of flash branded data storage products, including Vice President of Global Marketing, Senior Vice President of Global Sales and Marketing and most recently as Executive Vice President and General Manager, Consumer Business.  At SanDisk, Mr. Chan helped drive the business from startup to over $3 billion in annual revenues.  Mr. Chan led SanDisk's entry into the retail business and was instrumental in creating and driving its retail presence through a branded product portfolio.  That business has grown to over $2 billion in annual revenues in under seven years with products being available through over 250,000 store fronts worldwide. 
 
From 1983 to 1992, Mr. Chan held marketing and engineering positions at Chips and Technologies, Signetics, and Delco Electronics.  Mr. Chan is a member of the Board of Directors of Affymetrix, a public company that is a leader in the rapidly growing genetic analysis market with the mission to revolutionize how the world benefits from genetic information and Synaptics, a public company that is a leading worldwide developer and supplier of custom-designed human interface solutions that enable people to interact more easily and intuitively with a wide variety of mobile computing, communications, entertainment, and other electronic devices.  Mr. Chan is also a director or Chairman of the Board of several privately held companies. 
 
Mr. Chan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Masters of Business Administration degree from Santa Clara University.

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