Alagu Periyannan is a technology entrepreneur & angel investor based in California. He was most recently Vice President of Advanced Collaboration Technologies at Verizon, the largest mobile operator in the US. Prior to that he was Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer of BlueJeans Network, a pioneer in business video conferencing recently acquired by Verizon. He has over 30 years of research, product development, and entrepreneurial experience in the Silicon Valley bringing innovative networking and video products to market. Alagu co-founded BlueJeans in 2010 after a brief stint as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at venture firms, Norwest Venture Partners and Greylock Partners. Before that he was CTO of Blue Coat Systems (now part of Symantec), the leader in web security for large Fortune 500 enterprises. He joined Blue Coat via the acquisition of Entera, a startup where he built Internet streaming systems used by some of the early Content Delivery Networks (CDN) to stream videos to consumers. Alagu started his career at Apple where he spent most of the 1990s in their Advanced Technology Group working on video over networks and was a founding member of the QuickTime Streaming team, the underlying foundation for Apple’s Music, Emmy winning video streaming technology and FaceTime video chat.
Alagu was born in Chennai and grew up in Madurai, Tamilnadu through high school, studying at Vikaasa School. He then went on to the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, Rajasthan where he earned a BE in Electrical and Electronics Engineering. He subsequently went to the US to complete a MS in Computer Science at North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA.
Alagu is involved in mentoring, advising and angel investing in many startups in Silicon Valley, North Carolina and in India. Alagu and and his wife, Theivanai, give back to the local community and to their alma maters through volunteering and philanthropy. They have created an endowed scholarship at NC State University to encourage women and diversity in entrepreneurship. Alagu is on the advisory board of the NC State Entrepreneurship Program and the Computer Science Department. He is an active mentor and investor in the BITS Spark Angel network.
Alagu currently resides in Palo Alto, California in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and 2 daughters. They like to travel extensively both in the US, India and around the world. When he is not working, Alagu loves to be out on the water most weekends sailing or SUP paddling in the San Francisco Bay, or playing tennis, bicycling or skiing in winter.
