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Menlo Ventures Adds Houman Haghighi as Business Development Partner

January 24, 2019

Today, I am delighted to welcome Houman Haghighi to Menlo Ventures as our new Partner for Business Development.

Houman brings a rich set of qualities and interests that growing, early-stage companies will undoubtedly appreciate. He’s developed, engineered, and brought multiple disruptive products to market. He’s built companies himself and invested in numerous promising startups.

Given this impressive history, he’s a natural choice to lead business development at Menlo Ventures. In this role, Houman will join our Fuel team and focus on accelerating the growth of Menlo’s portfolio companies. He will be there to guide and assist these businesses in securing the right customers, partners and additional rounds of financing. When partnering closely with management teams he will use all the resources of the firm to help break through barriers and address the most pressing challenges. He has a long career in this capacity and is known for both his tenacity and efficiency in making things happen.

Before joining Menlo, Houman spent 15 years with Qualcomm (including Qualcomm Ventures), a major semiconductor and telecommunications company in San Diego, in a variety of engineering, product, and business development roles. One of his most memorable product development efforts was creating and launching Whispernet, which was the technical magic behind book delivery for the Amazon Kindle. As a business development lead for the company, he also worked closely with an array of industry pioneers, including AttackIQ, Clarifai, Cohesity, Fitbit, Magic Leap, MapR, Ring, RetailNext, Thundersoft, and Zoom.

As a founder himself, Houman is a natural when it comes to collaborating with entrepreneurs. In addition, he built and ran Qualcomm’s successful Robotics Accelerator mentorship program, which invested in 10 robotics (a key investment area for Menlo) startups around the world. And he holds several U.S. patents in the field of radio frequency modulation for mobile phones.

At Menlo Ventures, we’re constantly adapting to the changing needs of entrepreneurs and designing services to support them. Business Development is a key part of Menlo’s Fuel program, along with talent, marketing, and network development. It’s great to have this piece in place with someone who can immediately hit the ground running, knows how to best serve entrepreneurs, and operates with a sense of urgency. We couldn’t be more thrilled to have Houman aboard.

Welcome, Houman! We’re excited to have you on the team and look forward to seeing you in action with Menlo-backed entrepreneurs shortly!