About Me
Hello! I'm Niraj Tolia.
I am the currently the Managing Director of 396 Signals, where I provide strategic, product, and technical guidance to CEOs and founders of software companies. I also invest in early-stage startups, and offer pro bono support to under-represented founders. As part of my consulting practice, I currently serve as a Strategic Advisor at Veeam, advising on special projects, M&A, industry trends, and market evolution.
My professional journey has been defined by a singular focus: pioneering the future of data resilience, storage, and management for the enterprise.
I previously served as the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for Veeam, where I owned strategy and execution for the company's SaaS, cloud, and AI product initiatives. In this role, I focused on scaling Veeam Data Cloud, Veeam's exabyte-scale SaaS platform, which became the fastest product in Veeam's history to reach significant revenue traction. I also spearheaded the adoption of AI across the software development lifecycle.
This impactful work built upon two successful ventures I founded. Most recently, I was the CEO and Co-founder of Alcion, a security-first, AI-driven data management startup for modern SaaS environments like Microsoft 365, which was acquired by Veeam in 2024. Prior to that, I founded and led Kasten, the market-leading Kubernetes data management platform, establishing the standard for cloud-native data protection before its acquisition by Veeam in 2020. Before my entrepreneurship track, I was the Vice President of Engineering at Maginatics (acquired by Dell EMC), where my work in distributed cloud storage ultimately turned into the Dell EMC CloudBoost family of products.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where I focused on distributed storage systems with an emphasis on data deduplication and wide-area network data transfer. I also received an MS degree in Computer Engineering and a BS degree, with University and College Honors, in Computer Engineering with an additional major in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Since then, am honored to be recognized as a Distinguished Alumni by Carnegie Mellon's industry-recognized Parallel Data Lab (PDL), a group I was a part of during my graduate studies.