Pawan Deshpande
Product & Growth for AI • Angel Investor
San Francisco Bay Area
Invests in
Sectors:
Locations:
Min Investment:
$25,000.00Max Investment:
$150,000.00Target Investment:
$50,000.00
Skills
Education
Lists including Pawan
Investments
Work Experience
2024
Product
2024
Enabling developers to build, ship, and scale trustworthy Gen AI apps.
2016
Angel Investor / Advisor / LP
2016
• Toast (restaurant PoS software - NYSE: TOST) • Upside Foods (lab grown meat - $608M funding) • LinkSquares (legal SaaS - $800M valuation) • Customers.ai (intent data & AI-driven automation) • Falkonry (Operations AI) Investor & Strategic Growth Advisor • Xpertly (Lightspeed-backed MarTech startup) • Viyaat Agro (India farmland cultivation) • Stage 2 Capital (B2B SaaS VC fund) • Stage 2 Catalyst (SaaS Seed Fund) • Anansi Capital (AI seed fund) • Scale Angels (Scale AI alum & employee fund) - Decagon, Cartesia, Avoca, Central AI, Simple AI, RetailReady, Toma AI, Numiro
2023 - 2024
Head of Product & Growth
2023 - 2024
Linea is the easiest, fastest, and safest way to fix broken data pipelines.
2022 - 2023
Product Leader, Fleet Data Engine & Smart Capture
2022 - 2023
Acted as general manager for a new active learning product designed to capture data from edge robot, drone, and autonomous vehicle fleets, enhancing machine learning models at then $7B late-stage AI startup. Led cross-functional teams in product, engineering, and design to commercialize the product and define its vision and architecture.
2020 - 2021
Product Director, MLOps
2020 - 2021
Directed product and growth initiatives for an enterprise-grade data science & MLOps (Machine Learning Operations) platform at this Series-F startup. Achieved a 10x customer growth within six months for a new product. Streamlined sales processes, conducted extensive customer discovery, and aligned the executive team on product strategy, product vision, and integration plans. Led the product and team integration of an acquired company, achieving zero attrition and creating high-impact demos for key stakeholders.
2007 - 2020
Founder & CEO
2007 - 2020
Conceptualized and launched three successful content marketing products, generating $XXM in total revenue and serving over 1,000 customers, including 20% of the Fortune 100. Scaled the company to a 50-member team with a 100% CEO approval rating on Glassdoor. Recognized as an industry thought leader, speaking at over 50 marketing and tech conferences, establishing Curata as a pioneer in content marketing SaaS. Curata customers included Alcatel, Aramark, Barracuda, Bayer, Cisco, Dell, Google, Huawei, IBM, JP Morgan, Lenovo, GE, Google, McKesson, McKinsey, Nuance, Oracle, PayPal, Pitney-Bowes, P&G, Pfizer, Red Hat, Roche, RSM, Salesforce, SAP, SendGrid, Splunk, Symantec, T-Mobile, US Army, Verizon, VISA, Walmart, Xerox, ZipCar & Zendesk.
2005 - 2005
Machine Learning Researcher
2005 - 2005
Invented a machine learning model for transliterating Roman characters to Indic scripts, available across 120+ languages and installed over 100M times. Featured in the New York Times for significantly empowering women and transgender bloggers. Resulted in a patent filing.
2004 - 2004
Software Developer
2004 - 2004
Invented the first “People You May Know” algorithm for social network recommendations by analyzing messages, emails, and calendars. Demonstrated by Bill Gates in 2006, this algorithm laid the foundation for similar features on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Resulted in a patent filing and a Washington Post Op-Ed on data vulnerability.
2004 - 2004
Software Development Engineer
2004 - 2004
Co-engineered product from scratch which detects and disrupts illegal peer-to-peer file sharing on corporate networks. Used by over 2,000 companies in 22 industries. IMLogic was acquired in January 2006 by Symantec Corp.
2003 - 2003
Software Developer
2003 - 2003
Developed SyncML based synchronization engine to integrate Kubi Client, a collaborative email add-on to Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes, with Salesforce.