Team

Ofer Bengal

Co-Founder & CEO

Ofer is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led several companies in the areas of data communications, telecommunications, Internet, homeland security and medical devices. Ofer was founder & CEO of RIT Technologies (NASDAQ: RITT), a provider of sophisticated telecommunications and data communications systems to major world carriers. He began his career as an aerospace engineer in the Israeli Air Force and then built his own aerospace engineering consulting firm. As a hobby, he has also invented, developed and licensed toy concepts to companies such as Milton Bradley, Hasbro and Tomy.

Ofer holds a Bachelor of Science (cum laude) in aerospace engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Yiftach Shoolman

Co-Founder & CTO

Yiftach is an experienced technologist, having held leadership engineering and product roles in diverse fields from application acceleration, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to broadband networks and metro networks. He was the founder, president and CTO of Crescendo Networks (acquired by F5, NASDAQ:FFIV), the vice president of software development at Native Networks (acquired by Alcatel, NASDAQ: ALU) and part of the founding team at ECI Telecom broadband division, where he served as vice president of software engineering.

Yiftach holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science and has completed studies for Master of Science in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Lead, Open Source Redis Development

Salvatore started his career in 1997 as a security researcher, writing the hping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hping) security tool and inventing the Idle Scan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_scan). Later he worked on embedded systems, focusing on programming languages research and creating a small footprint Tcl interpreter, which is still in active development. With a colleague, Salvatore created the first two Italian social applications in partnership with Telecom Italia. After this experience, he decided to explore new ways to improve web app development, and ended up writing the first alpha version of Redis and open sourcing it. Since 2009, he has dedicated most of his time to developing Redis open source code.

Over the years, Salvatore has also created a number of other open source projects ranging form software defined radio, to line editing tools, to children development environments. He lives in Sicily, Italy.

Jason Forget

CRO & GM North America

Jason is a seasoned go-to-market leader with a track record of building multinational sales teams and driving revenue growth. Over the past fifteen years, he has served in several global sales, marketing, services and operations leadership positions in private and public technology companies. Most recently, he was senior vice president of worldwide field operations at Imperva (NYSE: IMPV). As part of the IPO executive team, Jason was responsible for building the “sales machine” that grew sales from $1M to $225M. Prior to this, he held senior sales leadership roles at IMlogic (acquired by Symantec, NASDAQ: SYMC) and Netegrity (acquired by CA, NASDAQ: CA). Jason holds a Master of Business Administration from Bentley University and a Bachelor of Science in finance and marketing from Northeastern University.

Manish Gupta

Chief Marketing Officer

Manish has consistently grown enterprise value by building brand equity, architecting strategic ecosystems, managing efficient product portfolios, and driving metrics based demand generation programs globally. He has established leadership position in new market categories, built world-class marketing organizations, and orchestrated successful exits. Most recently, he was the chief marketing officer at Liaison Technologies, the leading cloud service provider for data management and integration. Previously, he has held marketing leadership roles at public corporations such as Apple, National Semiconductor, and Symmetricom (acquired by Microsemi). His private company successes include Kabira, the in-memory transaction platform pioneer acquired by Tibco Software.

Manish holds Masters and Bachelors degrees in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology and MBA from Santa Clara University.

Regev (Reggie) Yativ

VP Sales, Americas

Reggie is a seasoned commercial leader, with worldwide experience in technology sales, marketing and business management. Reggie was the senior director of marketing and worldwide services at Johnson and Johnson (ASP division) in the Americas, where he managed a $500 million business portfolio. Before J&J, he served as regional vice president of sales and marketing for Magic Software Enterprises (NASDAQ: MGIC) in the Americas, EMEA and APAC. He has also held positions such as COO of A. Marches International S.A Group in Paris, CEO of G.E.D B.V. (a VC fund in Amsterdam), and vice president of sales and marketing at Edusoft (a Nasdaq-traded educational software company).

Reggie holds a Bachelor of Arts from Tel Aviv University and studied human resources training at the University of Amsterdam.

David Maitland

VP Sales, EMEA

David has a track record of launching technology start-up companies into the EMEA region, he also is a proven sales executive with experience at several of the world’s most influential enterprise technology providers. Before Redis Labs, he was the General Manager for Couchbase, Inc. EMEA where he was responsible for building the EMEA business from its inception, resulting in Couchbase gaining customers from some of the largest brands across the region. Prior to joining Couchbase, he was the EMEA Sales Director for Terracotta Inc, where he was responsible for building the EMEA business from scratch, which grew rapidly resulting in being acquired by Software AG (Frankfurt TecDAX: SOW). David also held positions at Oracle Corporation where he was responsible for driving the Middleware business for Financial Services, also Sun Microsystems and Progress Software.

David holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Distributed Information Systems and a Higher National Diploma from the University of East London, United Kingdom.

Leena Joshi

VP Product Marketing

Leena has spent over fifteen years in the high tech industry in a variety of product marketing and product management roles. Most recently, she spent five years leading the Splunk solutions marketing team for IT operations, application management and application development. Prior to Splunk, she led product marketing for VMware’s flagship product VMware vSphere. She has also held product management and business operations roles at VMware, Intel and Accenture. Leena has a Bachelor of Engineering degree in computer technology from VJTI (the University of Mumbai), and a post graduate degree in management from the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta.

Rod Hamlin

VP Global Alliances and Strategic Partnerships

Rod is a proven enterprise software sales executive having helped lead and grow several notable companies to IPO or successful acquisition. Before Redis Labs, Rod served as a senior executive at Couchbase where he was responsible for all global alliances and partnerships. He joined Couchbase after his company, WIMM Labs, was acquired by Google (NASDAQ: GOOG) in late 2012. Rod has been a senior executive for two publically traded companies, serving as SVP of Sales & Marketing at Opera Software,and as EVP of Global Sales and Services at Nuance Communications (NASDAQ: NUAN). As an early employee with CRM pioneer, Onyx Software, Rod helped the company achieve a global presence and dynamic growth, leading to a successful IPO on NASDAQ. Rod has served on several advisory boards including Spoke Software and Jibe Mobile (acquired by Google). Rod received his bachelor’s degree from Pacific Lutheran University, and attended the master’s program in business administration at Seattle University.

Elad Ash

VP Research & Development

Elad brings over twenty years of experience as a developer, team leader, project manager, architect, R&D executive and CEO in small, medium and large companies. Most recently as vice president of research and development at MyHeritage, he was responsible for executing the company’s vision by focusing on quality, risk reduction and methodology to handle massive scaling challenges. Elad also owned and led a software solutions company focused on helping companies adopt new technologies and solve complex algorithmic challenges under tight schedules with limited resources. He previously held various technical positions in companies such as Applied Materials (NASDAQ: AMAT) and M-Systems (Acquired by SanDisk, NASDAQ: SNDK), and started his technical career as head of the mission critical command and control section in the Isreali Navy.

Cihan Biyikoglu

VP Product Management

Cihan is a big data enthusiast who brings over twenty years of experience to Redis Labs’ product team. Cihan started his career as a C/C++ developer. Most recently, Cihan was Dir. of Product Management at Couchbase, responsible for the Couchbase Server product. Cihan was also part of the team in Redmond, WA that launched Azure public cloud platform at Microsoft. He also delivered a number of versions of SQL Server product suite. Previously Cihan worked on Informix and Illustra database products that were later acquired by IBM.

Cihan holds a number of patents in the database filed, and has a Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering and a Master of Science in Database Systems.

Oren Yaqobi

VP Customer Success

Oren is a highly technical and customer-oriented individual, helping companies get more value with less effort. Previously, he managed the support team at OpTier, a leader in application performance management, where he spent years with global customers both on-site and off-site.

Oren holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Haifa in computer science and philosophy. In his nonexistent spare time he plays the keyboard in jazz and blues bands.

Ron Klinger

VP Global Support

Ron leads the Global Support team of Redis Labs. With over 18 years of experience in the industry, Ron is an experienced Customer Support Executive. Before Redis Labs, he was the Senior Director of WW Support at Imperva (NYSE:IMPV) where he has successfully built a Global Support Org. of several support groups from the ground up. Prior to that Ron held roles at P-Cube (acquired by Cisco, NASDAQ: CSCO) and was part of the team at Commtouch (NASDAQ: CTCH).

Ron holds a B.A.Sc from the IDC in Israel. In his spare time Ron enjoys reading Military History books, snowboarding and riding bikes with his son.

Sharon Link

VP Finance

Sharon brings fifteen years of solid financial management experience to Redis Labs. Previously, she served as a finance manager at a variety of companies, including Claymonut Medical Devices, Tau Hedge Fund, and Technomatix.

Sharon holds a Bachelor of Arts in accounting and economics from Tel Aviv University and a Master of Arts in law from Bar Ilan University.

Adi Stern

Director of Global HR

Adi has over ten years of experience managing recruitment and HR processes in the high tech industry. She brings vast experience supporting rapid growth and leading change within startup environments. Prior to joining Redis Labs, she served as an HR specialist and recruitment manager at PrimeSense (acquired by Apple), PTC (NSDAQ: PTMC) and Tripletec. Adi holds both a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and literature and a Master of Business Administration, specializing in information systems, from Bar-Ilan University.

Yaron Dolev

DevOps Manager

Yaron has twenty-five years of experience in IT management, and is an expert in mission critical systems and information security. His background includes management positions, as well as hands-on experience in various IT domains. Prior to Redis Labs, he served as head of global IT at Fundtech (NASDAQ: FNDT), where he led the company’s global IT team.

He holds a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.

Ofer Bengal

Co-Founder & CEO

Ofer is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led several companies in the areas of data communications, telecommunications, Internet, homeland security and medical devices. Ofer was founder & CEO of RIT Technologies (NASDAQ: RITT), a provider of sophisticated telecommunications and data communications systems to major world carriers. He began his career as an aerospace engineer in the Israeli Air Force and then built his own aerospace engineering consulting firm. As a hobby, he has also invented, developed and licensed toy concepts to companies such as Milton Bradley, Hasbro and Tomy.

Ofer holds a Bachelor of Science (cum laude) in aerospace engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Yiftach Shoolman

Co-Founder & CTO

Yiftach is an experienced technologist, having held leadership engineering and product roles in diverse fields from application acceleration, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to broadband networks and metro networks. He was the founder, president and CTO of Crescendo Networks (acquired by F5, NASDAQ:FFIV), the vice president of software development at Native Networks (acquired by Alcatel, NASDAQ: ALU) and part of the founding team at ECI Telecom broadband division, where he served as vice president of software engineering.

Yiftach holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science and has completed studies for Master of Science in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.

Salil Deshpande

Managing Partner, Bain Capital Ventures

At Bain Capital Ventures, Salil focuses on stage-agnostic investments in software infrastructure, open source, milddleware and enterprise software, such as ZeroTurnaround, DynaTrace, Compass Quality, Hazelcast, and others. Prior to Bain, he worked with Bay Partners, where he invested $85 million into twenty enterprise software infrastructure, open source, and social graph API platform companies, including SpringSource, Buddy Media, Groovy and Grails, LendingClub, Engine Yard, Sonatype, MuleSoft, Jambool, Covestor, Financial Content, Triggit, FantasyBook, Junglee Games, and Vaxart.

Prior to these roles, he was founder and CEO of Customware, a CORBA services company (acquired by Visigenic-Borland, now part of Micro Focus), co-founder and CEO of The Middleware Company (acquired by Precise, now part of Symantec), and of TheServerSide.com network of social media sites (acquired by TechTarget).

Earlier, he was a software engineer and held technical leadership positions at several technology companies such as Sun Microsystems, taught summer courses at Stanford University, and earned both a Master of Science in electrical engineering from Stanford University and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Cornell University.

Ronen Nir

General Partner, Carmel Ventures

Ronen joined Carmel Ventures in February 2008. He focuses on SaaS, Cloud and Internet investments and is on the board of Perfecto Mobile, Realmatch, Samanage, iRonsourve, Axxana, Kampyle and Shunra. Before joining Carmel, Ronen held senior executive positions in several leading hi-tech companies, including the positions of vice president of product for Verint Systems’ ACS division and project management director at ECtel (NASDAQ:ECTX), where he was in charge of delivering large scale projects to the North and Latin America regions. Previously, Ronen served for thirteen years in an elite Israeli Defense Force Intelligence Unit.

He holds a Bachelor of Arts (cum laude) in economics and middle east history from Tel Aviv University and a Master of Science in technology management from the University of Maryland University College (UMUC).

Shai Feinberg

Shai has been involved in daily operations, investing and financing aspects of technology ventures for the last fifteen years. He is founder and vice president of business development at Zazma, an online business-to-business financing company. Prior to that, Shai was CEO of Katsu, an online skill-based gaming company; the chief operations officer at Global ePay, a leading China-based virtual payment solutions company; as well as an early investor and board member of StorWize (acquired by IBM) and Oren Semiconductors (acquired by Zoran Semiconductors, NASDAQ: ZRAN). Earlier in his career, Shai was a director of business development at Israel Corp, were he was involved in venture and private equity investments, and led the seed investment in Followap (acquired by Neustar, NYSE: NSR). He also served as a director at Tower Semiconductors (NASDAQ: TSEM) and was involved in Tower’s decision to invest $1.5 billion in its Fab 2 plant.

Shai holds a Bachelor of Science in computer science and economics from Bar Ilan University and a Master of Business Administration from INSEAD.