Raghu Raghuram

Raghu Raghuram
Nationality	American
Occupation	Venture capitalist, technology executive
Title	Managing Partner and General Partner
Employer	Andreessen Horowitz
Known for	CEO of VMware (2021–2023), General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

Raghu Raghuram is an American technology executive and venture capitalist who served as the chief executive officer of VMware, a leading enterprise software company specializing in cloud computing and virtualization technology. His career in the technology industry spans several decades, including formative work at Netscape Communications and a long tenure at VMware during which he held a series of senior leadership positions before ascending to the role of CEO. Following VMware's acquisition by Broadcom, Raghuram departed the company and, in October 2025, joined the prominent Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a Managing Partner and General Partner. At a16z, he focuses on enterprise technology and infrastructure investments, drawing upon his extensive operational experience in building and scaling software businesses. His career trajectory—from product management at early internet companies to leading one of the largest enterprise technology firms and then transitioning to venture capital—reflects the evolving landscape of the technology industry over the past three decades.

Early Life

Limited publicly documented information is available regarding Raghu Raghuram's early life and upbringing. He is of Indian origin and holds American nationality. Details about his family background and formative years prior to his entry into the technology industry have not been extensively reported in major media outlets.

Career

Early Career at Netscape

Before his long association with VMware, Raghuram worked as a product manager at Netscape Communications, the pioneering internet company known for the Netscape Navigator web browser. At Netscape, he worked under Ben Horowitz, who served in a management capacity at the company. This professional relationship with Horowitz, forged during the early days of the commercial internet, would prove significant decades later when Raghuram joined Andreessen Horowitz. The experience at Netscape, a company at the center of the browser wars and the broader commercialization of the internet in the mid-to-late 1990s, provided Raghuram with foundational experience in product development and technology strategy.

VMware

Raghuram's most prominent corporate role was at VMware, where he spent a significant portion of his career and rose through the ranks of the organization. VMware, founded in 1998, became one of the most important enterprise technology companies in the world, providing virtualization and cloud infrastructure software used by businesses and governments globally. Raghuram held multiple senior executive positions at VMware over the course of his tenure, gaining deep expertise in cloud computing, software-defined infrastructure, and enterprise technology platforms.

Rise to CEO

Raghuram was appointed Chief Executive Officer of VMware, a role in which he led the company through a period of significant strategic importance in the enterprise technology market. As CEO, he was responsible for overseeing VMware's product portfolio, go-to-market strategy, and organizational direction. VMware under Raghuram's leadership continued to serve as a foundational technology provider for enterprise IT environments worldwide, offering products related to virtualization, multi-cloud infrastructure, networking, and security.

Broadcom Acquisition and Departure

Raghuram's tenure as CEO of VMware concluded in the context of Broadcom's acquisition of the company. The acquisition, one of the largest in technology industry history, resulted in significant organizational changes at VMware. Raghuram departed VMware following the completion of the transaction. The Broadcom acquisition marked the end of VMware's existence as an independent publicly traded company and represented a major transition point in the enterprise software landscape.

Andreessen Horowitz

On October 9, 2025, Andreessen Horowitz (commonly known as a16z) announced that Raghu Raghuram had joined the firm as a Managing Partner and a General Partner. The hire was reported by multiple major outlets, including Axios, Fortune, and The Information.

The appointment reunited Raghuram with Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z, with whom he had worked at Netscape years earlier. In a newsletter, The Information reported that Horowitz referred to the hiring in terms that compared Raghuram's operational significance to that of Jensen Huang of NVIDIA, underscoring the high regard in which the firm held Raghuram's technical and executive capabilities.

Shortly after joining a16z, Raghuram and Ben Horowitz sat for a joint interview with Fortune, in which they discussed topics including artificial intelligence, politics, and the broader state of the technology industry. The interview signaled Raghuram's engagement with the firm's public thought leadership and his focus on the intersection of enterprise technology and emerging AI trends.

Investment and Advisory Activities

In his capacity as General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Raghuram began making and supporting investments in enterprise technology and infrastructure companies. In late 2025, he authored a post on the a16z blog announcing the firm's investment in Temporal, a company focused on workflow orchestration technology. In the post, Raghuram discussed the evolving capabilities of AI systems and the infrastructure required to support increasingly autonomous AI-driven processes.

In December 2025, Raghuram announced a16z's investment in Unconventional, a company working on GPU technology and infrastructure for artificial intelligence workloads. In the investment announcement, Raghuram noted the central role of GPUs as the backbone of the AI industry and discussed the significance of continued advances in GPU technology for both training and inference workloads.

These early investments reflected Raghuram's focus areas at a16z: enterprise infrastructure, cloud-native technologies, and the hardware and software ecosystems supporting the growth of artificial intelligence.

Thought Leadership at a16z

Shortly after joining Andreessen Horowitz, Raghuram contributed to the firm's content platform with insights drawn from his experience as a technology executive. In October 2025, the a16z blog published a piece featuring Raghuram's perspectives on what technology companies should prioritize after achieving product-market fit. The article, introduced by Ben Horowitz, drew on Raghuram's years of experience at VMware scaling products and organizations beyond the initial startup phase. The piece reflected Raghuram's operational expertise and his understanding of the challenges that technology companies face as they transition from early-stage growth to sustainable, large-scale enterprises—a perspective informed by his years leading VMware through various stages of corporate evolution.

Personal Life

Limited publicly documented information is available about Raghu Raghuram's personal life. He maintains a relatively private profile outside of his professional activities. He is based in the United States and has spent much of his career in the San Francisco Bay Area, the center of the American technology industry.

Recognition

Raghu Raghuram's appointment as CEO of VMware placed him among the most prominent Indian-American executives in the global technology industry, joining a cohort of leaders of Indian descent who have led major American technology companies. His subsequent hiring by Andreessen Horowitz as a General Partner was itself treated as significant news in the venture capital and enterprise technology press, with coverage from outlets including Axios, Fortune, and The Information reflecting the weight attributed to his move from corporate leadership to venture capital.

The framing of his hire by Ben Horowitz, who compared his significance to that of Jensen Huang in a newsletter item reported by The Information, further underscored the industry recognition of Raghuram's expertise in enterprise technology and infrastructure.

Legacy

While Raghuram's career continues to evolve in his role at Andreessen Horowitz, his tenure at VMware represents a significant chapter in the history of enterprise technology. VMware's virtualization and cloud infrastructure products transformed the way businesses manage their IT environments, and Raghuram was a key figure in the company's leadership during critical periods of its development and strategic evolution.

His transition from leading a major enterprise software company to investing in and advising the next generation of technology startups at one of Silicon Valley's most prominent venture capital firms represents a pattern increasingly seen among top technology executives. At a16z, Raghuram is positioned to leverage his deep operational knowledge of enterprise technology markets to identify and support companies building foundational infrastructure for cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and related fields.

His professional relationship with Ben Horowitz, which began at Netscape in the 1990s and continued through his hiring at a16z in 2025, illustrates the enduring nature of professional networks in Silicon Valley and the role such relationships play in shaping the technology industry's leadership landscape.