Steve Kaufman

Steve Kaufman serves as the CEO of Lexington Lighting Group, LLC, a manufacturer of energy efficient lighting for commercial and residential markets. He also serves as Principal of Quasar Holdings, LLC, which makes angel investments in growing companies.

Previously he served as CEO of Alteris Renewables, the largest design-build renewable energy company in the Northeast, until its 2011 merger with RGS Energy, after which he served as a director. Alteris was recognized as one of America’s fastest growing energy companies on the Inc. 500 list in both 2009 and 2010. The company won the ‘Green/Environmental Deal of the Year’ for the merger which created Alteris in 2008.

Earlier Steve worked as an operating partner for Riverside Partners, a Boston-based private equity firm that invests in growing technology and healthcare companies. Steve served on the boards of multiple companies at Riverside to help companies with their growth initiatives from investment until exit: SIXNET (now Spectris PLC), NDS Surgical Imaging (now GSI Group), Vocollect (now Intermec), Quantum Medical Imaging (now Carestream Health), and Applied Precision (now Rudolph Technologies).

Earlier Steve was President and CEO of Avici Systems (now Extreme Networks), a public telecommunications equipment company based in North Billerica, MA. Previously, he worked at Lucent Technologies (now Alcatel-Lucent) in Westford, MA as President of their Multiservice Core Networks Division, a $2B business. He also served as VP and GM of Lucent’s core switching business, and GM of their consumer microelectronics business. Steve earlier worked for Intel Corporation as one of the marketing managers who helped launch the Pentium processor family of products. He also worked for Kurzweil AI (now Nuance Communications) selling speech recognition systems.

Steve currently makes angel investments as a member of the Launchpad Venture Group in addition to CEVG. Steve previously served on the board of directors of the Massachusetts High Tech Council and also earlier co-chaired the state’s Northeast Regional Competitiveness Council focused on economic development initiatives. Steve lives in Lexington, Mass with his wife and 3 children.

Steve holds a BS in Electrical Engineering from Brown University, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and an MS in Computer Science from Stanford University. He holds 7 US patents in the field of communications.