Sundar Iyer (PhD/MS Stanford Univ. '08/'00, B. Tech IIT Bombay '98) is an angel and micro-VC investor, advisor and serial technology entreprenuer. He was the co-founder and head of Candid Systems (a Cisco Alpha Company). Candid (acquired by Cisco in Sep 2017) pioneered the Cisco Network Assurance Engine, a closed loop big-data software solution built with formal mathematicals models of Data Center networks. Previously, he was co-founder and CEO of Memoir Systems. Memoir (acquired by Cisco Systems in '14) pioneered Algorithmic Memory, to enable 10X Memory Operations Per Second on embedded memory. In the fall of '03, Sundar co-founded Nemo Systems, where he was the CTO and Principal Architect. Nemo aka. "Network Memory" (acquired by Cisco Systems in '05), specialized in caching algorithms for high-performance networking, developed by Sundar during his Ph.D. at Stanford. From fall '05 to '08, he co-led the Network Memory group at Cisco Systems, where he helped architect and build multiple generations of high performance memory sub-systems for Cisco's Enterprise and Data Center Ethernet products.

In 1999, Sundar was a founding engineer and senior systems architect at SwitchOn Networks (acquired by PMC-Sierra in 2000), where he developed algorithms (some of which were conceptualized during his B.Tech thesis at IIT Bombay) for deep packet classification. <br><br>

He is a recipient of the Christopher Stephenson best Master's thesis award in 2000, and the Arthur L. Samuel best doctoral thesis award in 2008, both in Computer Science at Stanford. In 2008, he was awarded the MIT technology review (TR35) young innovator award for his work on network memory, and the IIT Bombay Young Alumni Achiever Award in 2014. His advisory and venture investments since 2018, include technology startups in Space Systems, Brain-Computer Interfaces, AgriTech, Artificial Intelligence for Automotive, Healthcare, Security, Adtech and SalesTech; and DevOps and Blockchain.  <br><br>

Iyer successfully filed a motion to sanction the California Civil Rights Department (CRD) in Jan 2023 for their reckless indifference to the Truth and prosecutorial abuse, resulting in the CRD dropping their caste discrimination lawsuit against him. He founded the Essense foundation in Dec 2023 to help defend the Truth, defend Californians, Indians, and Indian Americans from disinformation, and combat government abuse.

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