Rajesh Swaminathan is a Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he backs bold founders reinventing how the world powers, builds, and heals itself. With two decades of deep-tech investing and company-building experience, Rajesh leads many of KV’s investments across renewables, industrial decarbonization, advanced manufacturing, critical minerals, compute infrastructure, and also the convergence of many of these domains with AI.
Before KV, he led Applied Ventures, the venture arm of Applied Materials, managing a global portfolio of 85 startups and two deep-tech funds in Korea and Taiwan, with multiple successful exits. Earlier in his career, Rajesh worked with startups while at Third Point Ventures and Lucent’s Bell Labs. While at Bell Labs, he partnered with many startups to successfully develop and deploy next-generation network systems globally.
Rajesh earned his MBA from Harvard Business School, completed graduate studies at the University of Maryland, and received his undergraduate degree in engineering from IIT Madras, where he was awarded the President of India Medal for overall excellence.
