Goutham Rao

Gou Rao is the CEO and co-founder of NeuBird AI, the creators of Hawkeye, the world’s first Production Ops Agent. Hawkeye is designed to help IT teams, SREs and platform engineers diagnose and resolve technical issues instantly, enabling seamless collaboration between human teams and AI. It builds on a career spent rethinking enterprise infrastructure at each major platform shift—from secure networking to storage to the cloud-native era.

A serial entrepreneur with a proven track record, Rao has co-founded and successfully exited multiple companies. He co-founded Portworx, acquired by Pure Storage for $370 million; Ocarina Networks, acquired by Dell; and Net6, acquired by Citrix. Across all three, he partnered with longtime co-founder Murli Thirumale on a “sell first, build later” philosophy—a formula they call SDBS (sell, design, build, scale)—that started with finding customers willing to help hone an idea into a product they would actually buy.

At Portworx, Rao served as CTO and, drawing on his years as chief technology officer of data protection at Dell, saw a strategic opening in the developers flocking to containers and Kubernetes. Rather than build for traditional storage administrators, the team went all in on software—a bet, guided in part by early Mayfield board conversations, that grew Portworx to more than 100 customers including Comcast, GE, and Lufthansa before its acquisition by Pure Storage in 2020.

Rao is also an accomplished inventor with over 50 issued patents spanning computer networking, storage, and security. With NeuBird, he is applying that depth of infrastructure experience to the next platform shift: autonomous, generative AI-driven operations that let human teams and AI work side by side.