Sunder Iyer
Technology and AI entrepreneur, angel and micro-VC inverstor, and advisor and founder of several companies in USA
Sundar Iyer (PhD/MS Stanford Univ. '08/'00, B. Tech IIT Bombay '98) is a serial technology entrepreneur, angel and micro-VC investor, and advisor. He was the co-founder and head of Candid Systems (a Cisco Alpha Company) that pioneered the Cisco Network Assurance Engine, a closed loop big-data software solution built with formal mathematical models of Data Center networks. Previously, as co-founder and CEO of Memoir Systems(acquired by Cisco Systems in '14) he pioneered Algorithmic Memory, to enable 10X Memory Operations Per Second on embedded memory. In 2003, Sundar co-founded Nemo Systemsand was its Principal Architect. Nemo aka. "Network Memory" (acquired by Cisco Systems in '05), specialized in caching algorithms for high-performance networking, developed by Sundar during his Ph.D. at Stanford. Leading the Network Memory group at Cisco Systems, he helped architect and build multiple generations of high-performance memory sub-systems for Cisco's Enterprise and Data Center Ethernet products. In 1999, Sundar was a founding engineer and senior systems architect at SwitchOn Networks (acquired by PMC-Sierra in 2000), where he developed algorithms (conceptualized during his B.Tech at IIT Bombay) for deep packet classification.
He is a recipient of the Christopher Stephenson best Master's thesis award (2000), and the Arthur L. Samuel best doctoral thesis award (2008) at Stanford. In 2008, he was awarded the MIT technology review (TR35) young innovator award for his work on network memory, and the IIT Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award in 2014. In 2021, he co-founded Leverage, to focus on advisory and early-stage venture investments, which include Space Systems, Brain-Computer Interfaces, AgriTech, Artificial Intelligence for Automotive, Healthcare, Security, Adtech and SalesTech; and DevOps and Blockchain.
Iyer successfully filed a motion to sanction the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) in Jan 2023 for their reckless indifference to the Truth and prosecutorial abuse, resulting in the CRD dropping their caste discrimination lawsuit against him. He founded the Essense foundation in Dec 2023 to support AI Systems which help defend the Truth, and prevent disinformation, as prevalent in the media, academia and legislation. He is active in combatting government abuse, especially against ordinary Californians, Hindu and Indian Americans.