Palaniswamy “Raj” Rajan co-founded Virima Technologies and serves as the company’s Chairman & CEO. With more than 15 years experience in the technology industry, Rajan has a deep understanding of current technologies and has the ability to articulate the application of these technologies in various business contexts and models. A highly versatile and proven entrepreneur, Rajan also founded Vigilar, Inc, a leading network security technology firm; eLaunchpad, LLC, an early stage venture capital firm/incubator focusing on Internet infrastructure and network security technologies; and Emerald Systems, a boutique technology consulting firm. During his tenure at Vigilar, he grew annual revenues to $32M from 2000 to 2005, during the most difficult technology industry climate. Another previous success, financial aggregator VerticalOne was sold to S1 in 1999 in a deal valued at $166 million.

Rajan previously served on the Board of Directors for Vigilar, currently serves on the Board of Directors of Virima and serves on the advisory boards of several early stage technology firms around the country. A leader in the business community, he is involved in several professional and community organizations. Rajan was instrumental in establishing the Atlanta CEO High Tech Council, where he serves as the Chairman of the Board of Directors, and he co-founded and serves on the Board of Directors of the Atlanta Chapter of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE). Rajan was honored as Georgia Trend’s “40 Under 40” Rising Stars in 2000. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering and a Master’s degree in Computer Science from the Florida Institute of Technology.

Dr. Paul Lopez is the President of LPI Enterprises, LLC, which invests in early stage companies, providing financing and wisdom. Dr. Lopez is also the President-Elect of TiE Atlanta. TiE is the largest non-profit global organization focused on entrepreneurs, with over 13,000 members in 61 chapters across 21 countries, of which Atlanta is ranked as the 4th largest chapter in the worldwide network.

As an entrepreneur, he was a Co-Founder and Managing Principal of Element Funding, a residential mortgage lender with branches across Georgia, Florida and North Carolina that has served over 23,000 families with over $5 billion in mortgage financing from 2007 till his retirement in spring 2017.

In his prior corporate career, Paul worked for eight years as Executive Vice President of Business Development & Sales at HomeBanc Mortgage Corporation, a regional mortgage bank. Prior to working in the financial services industry, he was employed in high tech for 20 years at IBM and Xerox in field and headquarters positions, and has been a faculty member at the business schools of Kennesaw State University and California State University, teaching in their Executive MBA and BBA programs respectively. He has also lectured in Europe and Asia in the area of leadership.

He holds a doctorate in business administration from Louisiana Tech University, an MBA from the Queen’s University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, and a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Calcutta, India.

Paul is highly involved in the community, currently serving on the board of Action Ministries, which administers to the poor across north Georgia through housing, food, clothing and education programs.

Paul resides in the East Cobb suburb of Atlanta, GA, and is blessed to be living the American Dream as a first-generation immigrant, having arrived in the US in 1974 to attend graduate business school. He has two grown children and five grandkids, all living in metro Atlanta. His hobbies are attending live theatre and international travel.

C.N. (Madhu) Mad­husu­dan is an exec­u­tive, entre­pre­neur and deal maker with sig­nif­i­cant expe­ri­ence in set­ting up, acquir­ing and oper­at­ing busi­nesses in Europe, India and the United States.  His exper­tise areas include growth/exit strat­egy, M&A, and cross-border transactions.

An early mem­ber of the team that built the NIIT Group in India, he estab­lished the group’s pres­ence in the United States.  This US entity became the NIIT Group’s largest sub­sidiary and was nom­i­nated twice for the Atlanta Inter­na­tional Busi­ness Award.   Later, as Pres­i­dent of NIIT Ven­tures, he led sev­eral new ven­ture invest­ment ini­tia­tives and cross bor­der acqui­si­tions involv­ing the US, Europe and India.  As a cor­po­rate buyer, he eval­u­ated a large num­ber of founder led com­pa­nies and devel­oped a deep insight into entre­pre­neur­ial think­ing, exit strate­gies, deal struc­tures, post-merger inte­gra­tion and gov­er­nance challenges.

He is the founder and CEO of Vec­torSpan Inc., an enter­prise that enables com­pa­nies plan their growth/exit strat­egy, engi­neer inor­ganic growth and make cross-border trans­ac­tions and inte­gra­tion successful. He has con­sulted, trained and men­tored lead­er­ship teams of a num­ber of diverse com­pa­nies and has led acqui­si­tions of a num­ber of founder led com­pa­nies.  He has sig­nif­i­cant trans­ac­tion expe­ri­ence with pri­vate equity groups like Advent Inter­na­tional, Bain Cap­i­tal, Berk­shire Part­ners, Fur­man Selz, GE Equity and global cor­po­rate acquir­ers like ADP, EBSCO, Eisen­mann and Sodexo.

His board level expe­ri­ence spans com­pa­nies in the United States, Europe and Asia.  As a speaker, he has addressed audi­ences at the World Bank, IFC, IMF, Insti­tute for Inter­na­tional Research, Geor­gia Insti­tute of Tech­nol­ogy, Emory Uni­ver­sity, Colum­bia Busi­ness School, Ross School of Busi­ness, IIT Mum­bai, SIBF, TiE and UNESCO. He serves as the Chair­man of the Board of TiE – Atlanta, a not for profit group aimed at fos­ter­ing entre­pre­neur­ship. He stud­ied at the St. Joseph’s Col­lege, Ban­ga­lore, and the Indian Insti­tute of Man­age­ment, Ahmed­abad.  His pro­fes­sional edu­ca­tion includes Busi­ness Eval­u­a­tion at the Har­vard Busi­ness School.

Prior to founding 11-11 Ventures, Arul founded Enrich (a global leader in Oracle Procurement SaaS) in 2003 and grew it to a global company across North America, Europe and Asia, before his exit in early 2016. Enrich is now a Data Intensity company, owned by a private equity firm. Arul had his second exit in 2017 to a large global private equity firm called EQT, based out of Sweden. During his tenure with Enrich, Arul acquired two UK-based companies and setup global development centers across three cities in India. He was recognized as “Entrepreneur of the Year” by B2B magazine, FETNA and E&Y. Under Arul’s leadership, Enrich was recognized as Inc. 500/5000 company five years consecutively (Top 5 in IT), Deloitte Technology Fast 50 company and a pacesetter company from Atlanta Business Chronicle.

Arul’s key strengths are business model innovation, applying the right technology to solve business problems, backed up by his finance acumen in managing a company or an investment portfolio. He is passionate about managing and growing investments across private and public companies. He started investing when he was 21 years old and enjoys managing most of his net worth assets by himself.

Arul received his Bachelors in Mechanical Engineering from Madurai Kamaraj University, India, and is also a CPIM from APICS.