Management Team / Advisory Board Bios
Vishal AhluwaliaCEO & FounderVishal Ahluwalia is the founder and CEO of KeeperAI, and is leading KeeperAI into the Future of Work and the Digital Workplace.
An entrepreneur at heart, Vishal’s career experience spansfrom Tea plantations in Darjeeling, India to boardrooms at Fortune 50 companies.He has more than 20 years of experience in banking, sales, enterprise transformation, research and development, operations, mergers and acquisitions and client experience improvement across multiple markets and cultures.
Vishal has held executive leadership positions at JP Morgan, UBS, Credit Suisse, and Unisys. At UBS, in his role as Head of Strategy of the Americas he brokered a deal to sell a legacy SAP product to one of the largest global integrators. In his role at J.P Morgan Chase, Vishal was the global head for Digital transformation - client experience and automation function, where he streamlined legacy processes using robotic process automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Blockchain. He Represented the bank at an industry consortium (partly owned by Goldman Sachs, DTCC, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Credit Suisse, and BNY Mellon) where he was intimately involved in the deal to sell the Clarient platform to Thomson Reuters.
Vishal holds an MBA from the Institute of Management Education along with post graduate executive leadership courses. He is an active advisor to various companies and a regular speaker to various professional and ivy league collegiate audiences on topics regarding fintech, globalization, the future of work and the digital workplace., Jeff Silver Head of Corporate FinanceJeff has over 30 years of corporate finance, private equity, M&A, investment banking, CFO, business development, and entrepreneurial executive management experience. Jeff has been involved in over 100 closed corporate finance transactions with an aggregate value exceeding $10B. He currently serves as Managing Partner of Ridgeline Partners, a merchant banking firm that assists emerging growth companies, including KeeperAI, as Head of Corporate Finance with strategy, business development, and other activities.
Jeff worked in investment banking, corporate finance, and M&A for Merrill Lynch in New York (1994-1997); Montgomery Securities in San Francisco (1997-2000); Roth Capital Partners in Newport Beach (2000-2002); and Millennium Capital Partners, a Greater-China focused merchant banking firm, in Beverly Hills, CA (2002-2006). He also served as a founder and executive with an ‘early Myspace’ Internet 1.0 B2C SaaS technology start-up where he personally repaid the Company’s debtholders in full, prior to closing the Company when financing markets evaporated during the dot com crash (2000).
Prior to his MBA, Jeff spent five years in forensic accounting and litigation support as a Manager with Chicago-based Peterson Consulting in San Francisco (1988-1993) where he assisted on legal cases involving lost profits, construction cost overruns, utility rate cases, Ponzi schemes, savings & loan fraud, and others.
Jeff graduated with honors with an MBA from UCLA Anderson (1995) and a BBA from the University of San Diego (1988). He serves as a Past President of UCLA Anderson’s Orange County Alumni Network. Jeff was a starting midfielder for the University of San Diego’s men’s soccer team that led the nation in Division 1A with a 19-4-1 record, and a starting forward for the San Francisco Scots, a semi-professional soccer team in San Francisco. Jeff was born in Hawaii, grew up in Silicon Valley, CA, and now splits time between the San Francisco Bay Area and Hawaii.
Derek Stanford Head of ITDerek Stanford is the Head of IT at KeeperAl, where he leads the company's software development and data science work. With over twenty years of experience leading projects in data science and applied statistics, Dr. Stanford has spoken at international conferences and authored several academic papers on pattern detection and automatic clustering.
In previous roles he served as Director of Analytics at companies specializing in fraud detection and customer insights, and as Principal Investigator on a research project for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He earned a PhD in Statistics at the University of Washington, following an MS in Mathematics at Claremont Graduate University and a BS in Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College.
Victor AvilesHead of CommunicationVíctor Aviles is the Head of Communications at KeeperAI. He oversees content strategy and messaging and evolves KeeperAI’s corporate, market and customer-facing narratives, from mission and vision, to press releases, investor decks, web and editorial content, and more.
Prior to KeeperAI, Victor has held executive positions at Fortune 100 companies, including J.P. Morgan and AIG and led change management communication programs for clients as a consultant at AON. Prior to that, he led communication and community and public relation functions in the healthcare industry at Montefiore Medical Center and UMDNJ, respectively the fourth largest hospital network in New York City, and Northern New Jersey's level-1 trauma center and an academic health center (now called the Rutger's School of Biomedical and Health Sciences).
He has a Bachelor's degree in Communications & Marketing from Pace University and is a Master's Degree candidate at Pace University's Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.
He was born, raised and currently resides in New York City and is married with two boys, 6 and 12. When he's not crafting strategic content for KeeperAI, he's likely travelling to and from the boys' hockey practices, games and tournaments.
Gary AlbrightHead of HR AlliancesGary Albright provides KeeperAI with input on features and functionality of our product based on his perspectives acquired over the course of his career in Human Resources. He has extensive experience in high-growth business environments. He has been developed strategies and implemented major initiatives across all areas of Talent Acquisition, workforce development, relocation, and HR systems.
From 2010 to 2016, he was the Director of Talent Acquisition at Amazon Lab126. Lab126 is the innovation engine for Amazon’s consumer electronics devices including Kindle e-readers, FireTV, and the Alexa speech platform devices. He built the recruiting processes and team that enabled the business to grow from 240 employees (with one product in the market) to an organization of over 4,000 employees (with over 35 products in the market).
Prior to Amazon, he held senior Human Resources positions at BEA, Veritas Software, Cadence Design Systems, Advanced Micro Devices, and The Gap. He has been a member of the management team of Trovix (acquired by Monster, Inc. in 2008 for $62.5 million) and an adviser to a number of start-ups focused on Human Resources applications. He holds a Masters Degree in Political Science from the University of Florida and has served on the board of directors of Project Hired, a not-for-profit organization whose mission is to assist people with disabilities obtain gainful employment.
Sonia RoubeniHead of Applied SciencesSonia Roubeni, Ph.D., is an Applied Developmental Psychologist who operates at the intersection of science, scholarship and program practice. She has over fifteen years of experience using the power of research and tested conclusions to inform and guide non-profit and for-profit organizations to optimize their operations and maximize their ability to meet their benchmarks. Sonia is responsible for all elements related to behavioral science at Keeper.
Sonia has an extensive record of teaching at the collegiate level. Her academic program of research and publications center on ethnic and socio-economic disparities in academic achievement, early childhood development and parenting in the context of immigration, after-school mentoring for positive youth development, and the evaluation of social programs.
Sonia served as Director of Research and Evaluation at the community-based organization Community of Unity (2012-2020) where she coordinated and facilitated all research and evaluation needs of an after-school program for at-risk urban youth. Her skills in scientific methodology, drawing tested conclusions from raw performance data, as well as her expertise in processes of social-emotional learning and soft skills development, led her to join KeeperAl in 2021 as Head of Applied Science. At KeeperAl, she guides the professional teams in the development and validation of a digital platform that harnesses soft skills insights.
Sonia graduated with honors with her BA in Comparative Literature from New York University, and her Ph.D. in Applied Developmental Psychology from Fordham University. She serves on the Young Professionals Board of the International Scholarship Educa continues to support Community of Unity as member of their Advisory Board. Sonia hails from Hamburg, Germany, and resides in New York City.
Rafael Rocha Board memberRafael has been involved in investing for more than 18 years in several segments and geographies.For over 16 years Rafael has focused on public and private equity markets in North America, Europe, and Latin America. His experience in venture capital spans the scope of investor, advisor, and mentor to venture funds and start-ups alike. Throughout the years, Rafael has also been a member of several boards of directors and audit committees in both public and private companies.
Dean GrazianoBoard MemberDean has 20 years of experience in entrepreneurial ventures. Prior to his involvement with KeeperAI , Dean was the Co-Founder and CEO of uZoom, Inc. in Seattle. uZoom is the first “one to one” live mobile streaming platform that is “user controlled” versus “broadcast” and “producer controlled”.
Prior to uZoom, Dean was the Founder and CEO of Lively, LLC, a Seattle-based direct-to-fan mobile platform that provides professional-quality audio and video recordings of live performances through an app-based interface. Through the Lively platform, artists can create, market, and profit from their content while giving fans a new way to interact with their favorite bands and discover entirely new performances. Lively was acquired in the summer of 2014 by VNUE (www.vnue.com) based in Boston and LA.
Dean was also a Founder and VP of Business Development at Visible Technologies Inc., an industry leading online social media software company located in Bellevue, WA. Dean started Visible Technologies in 2004 and in four years grew the company to 110 employees and $16MM in revenue in 2009. That same year, Visible Technologies was voted the 2nd fastest growing company in Seattle/Puget Sound, listed #170 on Inc. Magazine's Fastest Private Companies, and was a Top Performer in the 2009 Forester Wave Report.
In 2007 Dean was also part of the founding team at Reach Machines, ultimately called Meteor Solutions. Meteor Solutions was acquired in 2012 by Covario, a leading search marketing and digital agency.
Dean currently lives in Seattle, WA with his wife Marian and their three kids. Dean sits on several Advisory Boards and is highly active in the Seattle start-up community. Dean was also an All-American soccer and tennis player at university and earned a BS in Sports Management.