Rajesh Swaminathan

Rajesh is a Partner at Khosla Ventures. Rajesh brings with him two decades of experience assisting and investing in deeptech/ hardware startups across many industries including Cleantech and Healthcare.

Before joining Khosla Ventures, Rajesh served as the Head of Applied Ventures LLC, the Venture Capital arm of Applied Materials, where he managed a portfolio of over 85 hardware startups across 13 countries. Rajesh also drove the establishment of an $850M Materials Engineering Technology Accelerator (META) facility in NY, to enable access of semiconductor fabs for startups. Rajesh received Global Corporate Venturing’s (GCV) Powerlist award in 2019.

Before joining Applied Ventures, Rajesh worked at the venture arm of Third Point LLC. Previously, at Lucent’s Bell Labs, he drove the technical assessment & partnerships with several Photonics, MEMS and RF startups. Rajesh also led the design for reliability program for Lucent’s 10Gb/s and 40Gb/s telecommunication systems and supported the successful deployment of these systems globally.

While pursuing his MBA at Harvard Business School, Rajesh interned at Deutsche Bank’s cleantech investment banking group. Rajesh completed his M.S. at the University of Maryland at College Park, and received his Bachelor’s degree in Chemical Engineering from IIT Madras where he was awarded the Shankar Dayal Sharma (President of India) Medal for overall excellence.