Kanwal was the first Silicon Valley Indo-American Founder & CEO to take a venture-backed company public on the NASDAQ (Excelan: NASDAQ). In the 1990’s Kanwal became high profile Venture Angel while co-founding and leading TiE (The Indus Entrepreneurs) into the largest global mentoring network for Indian entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and around the world. Kanwal has co-invested and worked with John for 20 years and they founded Inventus in 2007 to institutionalize their high-conviction early stage approach to help Founders build category defining companies. Kanwal was also the first investor behind Manu Rekhi, Raju Reddy and BV Jagadeesh as they founded and built several successful startups in Silicon Valley.

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Kanwal is currently on the Boards of Dresma, Monetize360, Orbion Space Technology, and TenXer Labs. He led the investments or was on the Boards of Espresso Logic (ACQ: CA Technologies), FundsIndia (ACQ: WestBridge), GenWi (ACQ: Persistent Systems), Intellivision (ACQ: Nortek), Poshmark (IPO: NASDAQ), Sierra Atlantic (ACQ: Hitachi), StatX (ACQ: TapClicks), and actively mentored the Founders of redBus (ACQ: Naspers IBIBO).

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Kanwal earned a BSEE from IIT-Bombay and a MSEE and Honorary Doctorates in both Business and Engineering from Michigan Tech. He also founded the Kanwal Rekhi Schools of Information Technology at the IIT-Bombay and Michigan Tech.