Vinod Jayaraman

Vinod Jayaraman is the co-founder and CTO of NeuBird, the creators of Hawkeye, the world’s first Production Ops Agent, designed to help IT teams, SREs and platform engineers diagnose and resolve technical issues instantly. A repeat founder, he has spent his career building the deep systems that enterprises depend on—from storage optimization to cloud-native infrastructure, and now autonomous, AI-driven operations.

He previously co-founded Portworx, the cloud-native storage management platform acquired by Pure Storage for $370 million, where he later served as Chief Architect. Vinod first partnered with the Portworx founding team at Ocarina Networks, which he joined as principal architect in 2008 before its acquisition by Dell. Alongside co-founders Murli Thirumale and Gou Rao, he helped run a “sell first, build later” playbook—the SDBS formula (sell, design, build, scale)—that started with finding customers willing to help hone an idea into a product they would actually buy.

At Portworx, the team bet on the developers flocking to containers and Kubernetes rather than traditional storage administrators—a decision, shaped in part by early Mayfield board conversations, to go all in on software. Portworx grew to more than 100 customers including Comcast, GE, and Lufthansa before its acquisition in 2020. Vinod’s knack for making a technology tangible was a hallmark of that process; in one early prototype he demonstrated navigating Google Earth using only hand gestures with a circuit card strapped to his wrist.

Vinod has also held senior engineering and architecture roles at Dell Technologies and Ocarina Networks. He holds a degree from Pierre and Marie Curie University. 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.