(L->R: Guru Chahal, Yvonne Wassenar, Hemant Mohapatra, Dev Khare)
Today we are thrilled to welcome Yvonne Wassenaar to Lightspeed’s Venture Partner team as a senior advisor. With her arrival, we bring aboard an experienced and insightful leader to guide our enterprise / B2B / AI founders across India, Southeast Asia, and the US.
Yvonne is a seasoned operator, board member and founder coach / advisor. She started her career in Accenture’s Silicon Valley offices in the 1990s and, over two decades, saw technology subsume every part of our lives. She then had a front-row seat to Cloud and SaaS waves of the 2010s as the VP of strategy in the office of the CxO at VMWare, as CIO at New Relic, and as the CEO of Puppet. She has also served on the boards of several world class companies such as Alation, Braze, Arista Networks, JFrog, Anaplan and more.
Long been part of our extended Lightspeed family, Yvonne has been quietly advising our founders, helping to clear paths amid complexity, bringing calm to chaos, guiding visions toward their fullest potential. She was a board member at Lightspeed-backed MuleSoft and, more recently, serves on the board of Rubrik, another Lightspeed portfolio company, and helped shape its journey to an IPO. What is especially unique about Yvonne is her cross-border experience in advising companies such as Rubrik, Arista, Alation and Anaplan that have built large teams, revenue, and brands across multiple geographies including US, APAC, and Europe.
I have personally known Yvonne since she was the CEO of Airware, a US-based drone manufacturing and analytics company. Airware raised over $100M but eventually had to shut down given aerial technology, regulatory environments, and customer behaviors did not mature as fast as anticipated. Through those difficult times, I remember Yvonne as someone who possessed an unmistakable presence — sharp, intense, yet also remarkably gentle, a deeply human leader who drew others close and inspired them to truly listen. Over the years, Yvonne became my port of call for whenever I was helping our founders think through critical moments in their journeys. We are so glad to make this official now!
In her expanded role at Lightspeed, Yvonne’s impact will reach our early-stage innovators and our growth-stage disruptors, supporting companies in SaaS, AI, and beyond. We feel genuinely privileged to have Yvonne join us, to have her voice enrich our community, and her guidance shape the future for our founders. Her arrival underscores our commitment to empowering visionary entrepreneurs across borders and domains.
Welcome, Yvonne — we’re excited to journey with you, to build and dream together, and to see where the road ahead will lead.
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