Keval Desai

Founder & Partner

Keval is a Partner at SHAKTI, based in San Francisco. Prior to founding SHAKTI, Keval spent three decades in Silicon Valley as an engineer, entrepreneur, product leader, and investor. His operating experience includes co-founding Achex, a venture backed online payment company which was sold profitably in the Web 1.0 era. He joined Google pre-IPO leading monetization products including AdWords, Access & Google TV. Keval was a GP at Interwest for a decade before launching SHAKTI. His portfolio includes 60+ startups including early stage investments in Canva, The RealReal (IPO), Backblaze (IPO), Pipedrive, Vungle, Gatik.ai, Cambly, Cuyana, Stable, Abacus.ai, and others.

Keval has been recognized as a distinguished Entrepreneur at UC Berkeley where he has served on the advisory boards of the Engineering & Business schools. He has been part of the faculty at Berkeley Haas teaching the graduate level MBA course in VC/PE and part of the “6.0” club, the highest teaching distinction as recognized by students. In 1998, he founded one of the first startup accelerators in Silicon Valley at UC Berkeley (now known as “Launch”). Keval holds an M.S. in computer science, a B.E. in electrical engineering and an MBA.