Team Members

Admiral James Stavridis is an Operating Executive of The Carlyle Group, following five years as the 12th Dean of The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.  A retired 4-star officer in the U.S. Navy, he led the NATO Alliance in global operations from 2009 to 2013 as Supreme Allied Commander with responsibility for Afghanistan, Libya, the Balkans, Syria, counter piracy, and cyber security.  He also served as Commander of U.S. Southern Command, with responsibility for all military operations in Latin America from 2006-2009.  He earned more than 50 medals, including 28 from foreign nations in his 37-year military career.

Earlier in his military career he commanded the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet, winning the Battenberg Cup, as well as a squadron of destroyers and a carrier strike group – all in combat.  In 2016, he was vetted for Vice President by Hillary Clinton and subsequently invited to Trump Tower to discuss a cabinet position in the Trump Administration.

Admiral Stavridis earned a PhD in international relations and has published eight books and hundreds of articles in leading journals around the world.  His 2012 TED talk on global security has over one million views.  Admiral Stavridis is a monthly columnist for TIME Magazine and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News, and has tens of thousands of connections on the social networks.

Rayadurgam (Ravi) Ravikanth is Vice President of Engineering at PreVeil. Since joining the company in 2019, he has led software development and technical support, helping scale PreVeil’s secure communications and file-sharing platform.

Prior to PreVeil, Ravi served as Vice President of Engineering for the Small Cell product line at CommScope, following its acquisition of Airvana, where he was responsible for both hardware and software development. During his tenure at Airvana, he held a series of engineering leadership roles with progressively increasing responsibility. Earlier in his career, he worked at Nokia Research Center and Axiowave Networks.

Ravi holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He is an inventor on several patents in wireline and wireless networking.

Raluca Ada Popa is an assistant professor of computer science at UC Berkeley. Her research is in security and applied cryptography. Raluca has developed practical systems that protect data confidentiality by computing over encrypted data as well as designed novel encryption schemes. Raluca received her PhD in computer security as well as two BS degrees, in computer science and in mathematics, from MIT. She is the recipient of an Intel Early Career Faculty Honor award, George M. Sprowls Award for best MIT CS doctoral thesis, a Google PhD Fellowship, a Johnson award for best CS Masters of Engineering thesis from MIT, and a CRA Outstanding undergraduate award from the ACM.

Sanjeev Verma is a technology entrepreneur with a track record of building successful businesses. In 2000 he co-founded Airvana, which developed mobile wireless infrastructure used by leading mobile operators such as Verizon and Sprint to deliver high speed 3G data services. Airvana grew to be the world’s second largest supplier of CDMA 3G mobile data infrastructure and the world’s largest supplier of small cells. Sanjeev spent over 13 years at Airvana and helped grow the company’s business from an idea to a large public company. Prior to Airvana, Sanjeev held various technical and business leadership roles in Motorola’s Internet and Networking Group.

Sanjeev is also a member of the board of directors of Citizens School, an education non profit. He earned a BS in EE from the Delhi College of Engineering, an MS in EE from University of Rhode Island and an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Randy Battat co-founded PreVeil in 2015 and serves as its CEO.

Before PreVeil, Randy was President and CEO of Airvana (2000-2014), growing it from a startup to a 400-person global company. Airvana became the #2 supplier of CDMA infrastructure software for carriers like Verizon and Sprint. He spent thirteen years at Apple in leadership roles including Vice President of Worldwide Product Marketing and Vice President of the PowerBook Division, and later served as Senior Vice President at Motorola’s Internet & Networking Group.

Randy holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and was named New England Technology Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year in 2004.