Aaref Hilaly
Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
San Francisco, California
Invests in
Sectors:
Locations:
Min Investment:
$1,000,000.00Max Investment:
$100,000,000.00Target Investment:
$10,000,000.00
Skills
Lists including Aaref
Investments
Momento
Total Funding: $41M
Decagon
Total Funding: $30M
Cleanlab
Total Funding: $30M
Contextual AI
Total Funding: $20M
Noteable
Total Funding: $25M
Recharge
Total Funding: $280M
Clari
Total Funding: $500M
TruEra
Total Funding: $42M
Validere
Total Funding: $18M
ThousandEyes
Total Funding: $110M
Work Experience
2020
Partner
2020
BCV helps technical founders build businesses around their ideas. We invest early (seed / Series A), and commit -- working closely with founders on recruiting, early customers, messaging, launch and scale. Our team brings deep domain expertise in AI, cloud infrastructure, fin-tech, and more, and taps the unique network and portfolio of Bain Capital.
2025
Series C Investor
2025
Cognition is building the primary interface for human-computer interaction. Its starting point is a market leading IDE (Windsurf) and background coding agent (Devin). The company has grown rapidly to nine-figures in ARR within two years of its founding, with customers such as Citi, Goldman Sachs, Nubank and Ramp.
2025
Series B Investor + Board Member
2025
Krea is a leading AI platform for image generation and refinement. Its magic is in rapidly incorporating the latest models and making them available to creatives, without imposing an aesthetic -- instead, it amplifies the user's unique creative identity. Krea's 750K weekly active users create over 3M images a day.
2024
Seed & Series A Investor + Board Member
2024
Charta is an AI-powered medical chart review platform for physical practices. Instead of reviewing 1-3% of charts post-billing, with Charta practice groups review 100% pre-billing at a fraction of the cost. This lifts practice revenue 10-15% on day one and improves clinical outcomes.
2023
Seed & Series B investor + Board Member
2023
Decagon is building an agentic platform for customer communication, starting with customer support. The company has grown rapidly, winning market-leading customers like Figma, Notion and Rippling. Its pace of execution is ferocious.
2023
Series B & D investor + Board Member
2023
EvenUp is using genAI to build an operating system for personal injury attorneys. The company's Claims Intelligence Platform creates demand letters, medical chronologies, and other core units of work.
2023
Seed Investor + Board Member
2023
Contextual is a platform for bringing large language models (LLMs) into the enterprise, by addressing issues such as hallucination and attribution. The technology is inspired by the founders' seminal work on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at Facebook AI Research.
2012 - 2019
Partner
2012 - 2019
General Partner focused on Seed / Early. Over seven years, I invested in, and served on the boards of, a dozen companies. Two went public (Guardant Health, MobileIron), one is a unicorn (Clari), three were acquired for ~$1 billion each (Lightstep (ServiceNow), Skyhigh (McAfee), ThousandEyes (Cisco)), and a couple were total disasters. Privileged to learn venture investing from some of the best in the business.
2011 - 2012
Vice President, Engineering
2011 - 2012
Joined Symantec through its acquisition of Clearwell and served for a year on the leadership team.
2005 - 2011
President & CEO
2005 - 2011
Led company from the early stages of product development to over $100m in ARR within 6 years, growing 80% YoY. Raised a total of $33m from Sequoia (seed & Series A) and Redpoint (Series B). Burned a cumulative $25m to reach profitability. Clearwell was the leading e-discovery software (legal-tech) company for enterprises and government agencies. Symantec acquired Clearwell in 2011 for $410 million.