About Me
Hello! I'm Niraj Tolia.
I am the Co-Founder and CEO at Alcion.
I was previously the CEO of Kasten, a company I founded in order to solve the problem of Kubernetes backup and disaster recovery. After its acquisition by Veeam, I served as the General Manager and President and the SVP, Strategy of Kasten by Veeam. I also was a Governing Board member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
Given my extremely busy day job, I am not taking on any active advising or consulting opportunitites at this time. However, I am very open to pro bono work for under-represented founders. Check out 396 Signals for more information.
I have held multiple other leadership roles in the past including Senior Director of Engineering for Dell EMC's CloudBoost group and VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at Maginatics (acquired by EMC). I have a strong technical background in distributed systems, storage, and data management and, in a previous life, I was a Senior Researcher at HP Labs where I led research into non-volatile memories, Infrastructure-as-a-Service systems, and next-generation data centers.
I received my Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University, where I was a part of the Parallel Data Lab. My research concentrated on distributed storage systems with an emphasis on 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.