Keval Desai

Keval Desai is the founder and managing director of Shakti. He is also a general partner at InterWest Partners. He is a board member of Mapper, FetchRev, Cuyana and Grokker. He is an angel investor. During his three decades in Silicon Valley, he has been an engineer, entrepreneur, product manager and investor. His work experience includes co-founding Achex, an online payments venture capital firm that was sold profitably to First Data in the Web 1.0 era. He later moved to Google before its IPO, where he was head of monetization products, including AdWords, Access and Google TV. Before founding SHAKTI, he was CEO at InterWest Partners for ten years. His investment portfolio includes 60+ startups, including Canva, The RealReal, Postmates, Bolt, Backblaze, Pipedrive, Optimizely, Abacus.ai, Gatik.ai and others. He has been recognized as Outstanding Entrepreneur at UC Berkeley and Outstanding Alumnus at UC Santa Barbara. He serves on the advisory boards of the Sutardge Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkeley, and the School of Engineering at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In 1998, he founded one of the first Silicon Valley startup gas pedals at UC Berkeley (now known as Launch). He has a master’s degree in computer science, a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering, and a master’s degree in business administration.