Software Beyond the Screen

Software has had an amazing decade, as it has transitioned from desktop computers into the cloud and onto smartphones. The next decade will focus on software making an even more important jump: moving beyond the screen and into the real world around us.

In his talk, Sunil Nagaraj will explore how software is beginning to animate, understand and navigate the real world with profound implications. Using examples ranging from hospital robots to rocket engines to dairy cows, he will explain how powerful this shift will be to our daily lives and our global economies. He will touch on how the software engineering toolchain (APIs, scrum, object-oriented programming, over-the-air updates, etc.) has been perfected for computer software and how this powerful software development paradigm is being applied conceptually and tactically to enable smart hardware in the real world. He will also cover several applications of the machine learning branch of software and its ability to connect the dots and navigate our complex physical world.

Presenter(s)

Sunil Nagaraj is Managing Partner of Ubiquity Ventures, a seed-stage institutional venture capital firm that invests in “software beyond the screen” startups. This includes companies leveraging smart hardware and machine intelligence to bring software into the real world, not just on computers and smartphones.

Prior to founding Ubiquity Ventures, Sunil spent six years as a venture capitalist with Bessemer Venture Partners where his work included investments in Auth0, Defense.Net (acquired by F5 Networks), Rocket Lab, Spire, Tile, Twitch (acquired by Amazon), and Zapier. Prior to being an investor, Sunil was founder/CEO of Triangulate, a VC-backed online dating startup using machine learning and behavioral data to improve accuracy. He has also worked at Bain & Company, Cisco and Microsoft.

Sunil holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He serves on several non-profit boards: NextGen Partners (a Bay Area VC networking organization), Astronomical Society of the Pacific (as Vice President), and the Harvard Business School California Research Center. He is also an Alumni Advisor to the Harvard MS/MBA program.