Raghu Raghuram

Raghu Raghuram
Nationality	American
Occupation	Template:Hlist
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, the enterprise software and cloud computing company, from 2021 until the completion of Broadcom's acquisition of VMware in 2023. A veteran of the enterprise technology industry with decades of experience spanning product management, engineering leadership, and corporate strategy, Raghuram spent more than two decades at VMware, helping shape the company's evolution from a virtualization pioneer into a multi-cloud infrastructure leader. His career in Silicon Valley began in the 1990s, including a stint at Netscape Communications, where he worked under Ben Horowitz. In October 2025, Raghuram joined the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) as a Managing Partner and General Partner, marking a transition from operating large-scale technology enterprises to investing in and advising the next generation of technology companies.

Early Life

Details regarding Raghu Raghuram's early life, including his exact date of birth, childhood, and family background, are not extensively documented in publicly available sources. He is of Indian origin and built his career in the United States, where he became a prominent figure in the enterprise technology sector.

Career

Early Career and Netscape

Before his long tenure at VMware, Raghuram held roles at several technology companies during the formative years of Silicon Valley's internet boom. Notably, he served as a product manager at Netscape Communications, where he worked under Ben Horowitz, who was then a senior executive at the company. This professional relationship with Horowitz would prove enduring, spanning decades and ultimately leading to Raghuram's later role at Andreessen Horowitz.

VMware

Raghuram spent more than two decades at VMware, the Palo Alto-based company that pioneered virtualization technology and grew into one of the most significant enterprise software companies in the world. Over the course of his career at VMware, Raghuram held a series of increasingly senior roles, gaining deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, virtualization, networking, and enterprise software strategy.

Rise to CEO

Raghuram was appointed chief executive officer of VMware in 2021, taking the helm of a company that was navigating a complex period of strategic transformation. VMware had become a cornerstone of enterprise IT infrastructure, with its virtualization and cloud management products deployed by a vast majority of Fortune 500 companies and large enterprises worldwide. As CEO, Raghuram oversaw VMware's strategy during a period that included the company's spinoff from Dell Technologies and its subsequent operation as a standalone public company.

Broadcom Acquisition

Raghuram served as CEO of VMware through the announcement and regulatory review of Broadcom's acquisition of VMware, one of the largest technology acquisitions in history. The deal, valued at approximately $61 billion when announced in 2022, represented a major consolidation in the enterprise software market. Raghuram led VMware through the transition period until the acquisition closed in November 2023, at which point he departed the company.

During his tenure as CEO and in his prior leadership roles, Raghuram developed extensive experience in scaling enterprise technology businesses, managing product portfolios, and navigating the complexities of operating a company with a global customer base spanning multiple industries. His leadership at VMware provided him with firsthand knowledge of the infrastructure underpinning modern computing, including cloud computing, data center operations, software-defined networking, and enterprise security.

Post-Product-Market Fit Expertise

Following his departure from VMware, Raghuram became known for articulating the challenges that technology companies face after achieving product-market fit—the operational, organizational, and strategic hurdles involved in scaling from a successful product into a large, sustainable business. In an October 2025 discussion published by Andreessen Horowitz, Raghuram shared his perspectives on what founders and executives should prioritize once initial product-market fit has been established, drawing on his experience building and scaling VMware's product lines over more than two decades. His insights emphasized the operational dimensions of scaling—including go-to-market strategy, organizational design, and customer success—that become critical as companies transition from early-stage growth to mature enterprise operations.

Andreessen Horowitz

On October 9, 2025, Andreessen Horowitz announced that Raghu Raghuram had joined the firm as a Managing Partner and a General Partner. The hire was widely covered in technology and business media, with outlets including Axios, Fortune, and The Information reporting on the appointment.

The appointment reunited Raghuram with Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, under whom Raghuram had worked at Netscape decades earlier. In coverage by The Information, Horowitz compared the significance of the hire to having his own "Jensen"—a reference to Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia—suggesting that Raghuram's deep operational expertise in infrastructure technology would be a major asset to the firm's investment activities.

In a joint interview with Fortune published on October 12, 2025, Horowitz and Raghuram discussed a range of topics including artificial intelligence, the evolving technology landscape, and the state of politics as it relates to the technology industry. The conversation was described as "candid" and touched on questions that the two acknowledged did not have easy answers.

Investment Activity

In his capacity as a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Raghuram has been involved in the firm's investment decisions in enterprise infrastructure and AI-related companies. In December 2025, Andreessen Horowitz announced an investment in Unconventional, a company focused on GPU technology, which the firm described as "the backbone of the AI industry." The investment announcement noted the importance of advances in GPU technology for training and inference workloads in artificial intelligence.

Additionally, Andreessen Horowitz announced an investment in Temporal, a company focused on enabling AI systems to move beyond writing, designing, summarizing, and coding to taking more complex, autonomous actions. The firm's investment thesis noted the growing importance of durable execution platforms as AI systems begin to perform more agentic tasks.

Raghuram's investment focus at a16z reflects his deep background in infrastructure technology. His expertise in cloud computing, virtualization, and enterprise software positions him to evaluate companies building foundational technology for the AI era—a domain where his operational experience at VMware, which itself built critical computing infrastructure, is directly applicable.

Personal Life

Raghu Raghuram maintains a relatively private personal life. He is based in the United States and has spent the majority of his professional career in Silicon Valley. His long-standing professional relationship with Ben Horowitz, dating back to their time together at Netscape in the 1990s, has been noted as one of the more enduring partnerships in the technology industry, spanning from the early days of the commercial internet through the current era of artificial intelligence.

In the October 2025 Fortune interview, Raghuram and Horowitz discussed not only technology and business topics but also broader societal questions, including the intersection of politics and technology, reflecting Raghuram's engagement with issues beyond the purely technical domain.

Recognition

Raghuram's appointment to Andreessen Horowitz in 2025 received significant coverage across major business and technology media outlets, reflecting his standing in the enterprise technology community. Axios, Fortune, The Information, and the firm's own publications all covered the hire, with several outlets highlighting the significance of bringing a former CEO of a major enterprise software company into the venture capital world.

Ben Horowitz's characterization of Raghuram as his "Jensen"—drawing a parallel to Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia and one of the most prominent figures in the technology industry—was noted as a particularly strong endorsement of Raghuram's capabilities and potential impact at the firm. The comparison suggested that Horowitz viewed Raghuram's infrastructure expertise as analogous to the foundational role that Nvidia's GPU technology plays in the AI ecosystem.

Raghuram's career at VMware, where he rose through the ranks over more than twenty years to ultimately lead the company as CEO, is itself a notable achievement in an industry where executive tenures at a single company of that duration are uncommon. VMware under his leadership and the leadership of his predecessors became one of the defining enterprise software companies of the early 21st century, with its virtualization technology fundamentally changing how organizations deploy and manage computing infrastructure.

Legacy

Raghu Raghuram's career spans two of the most significant technological transitions of the modern era: the rise of cloud computing and virtualization in the 2000s and 2010s, and the emergence of artificial intelligence as a transformative force in the 2020s. At VMware, he played a central role in building and scaling technology that became foundational to enterprise IT infrastructure worldwide. Virtualization technology, which VMware pioneered and which Raghuram helped develop and commercialize over his long tenure at the company, fundamentally altered the economics and architecture of data centers, enabling the efficient utilization of hardware resources and paving the way for the cloud computing paradigm that now dominates the technology industry.

His transition to Andreessen Horowitz represents a new phase in which his operational knowledge of infrastructure technology is being applied to identifying and supporting the next generation of companies building foundational technology. His investment involvement in companies such as Unconventional (GPU technology) and Temporal (durable execution for AI systems) suggests a focus on the infrastructure layer that will underpin the AI era, much as virtualization underpinned the cloud era.

The pairing of a seasoned enterprise technology operator with a leading venture capital firm reflects a broader trend in Silicon Valley, where firms increasingly seek partners with deep operational experience in specific technology domains. Raghuram's unique combination of product management roots (dating back to Netscape), engineering leadership, and CEO-level experience at a company of VMware's scale positions him as a distinctive voice in the venture capital landscape, particularly for enterprise infrastructure investments.