Rajeev Shah, founder of Celona, successfully raised $135 million for his private 5G LAN solutions company. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
Rajeev Shah, founder of Celona, successfully raised $135 million for his private 5G LAN solutions company. The video highlights how Celona secured funding from top-tier VCs by strategically fundraising to block out competition and emphasizes the importance of conviction in developing future technologies.
be a little more patient. Everything takes a little longer than you think it will and the extra time is actually worth. All righty. Hello everyone and welcome to the dealmaker show. So today we have an amazing founder, amazing founder that has built quite the rocket ship. We're going to be talking about the raising, you know, the building, you know, we're going to be talking about the building a unique DNA for the business. Also thinking about fundraising too as a competitive, you know, differentiator and advantage. You know, in their case, they've raised over 135 million. Uh, and yeah, also the ability to influence big markets, you know, even though maybe you're an early player in the in the in the market, but super inspiring conversation ahead of us. And without further ado, let's welcome our guest today, Rajie Sha. welcome to the show. >> Thank you. Thank you, Alandro. Pleasure.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here. >> So, born and raised in India. How was life growing up over there? That >> was uh fantastic. You know, it was an interesting time uh in the 80s and '90s to be growing up in India. Um it prepares you for a life in Silicon Valley because tech had just made its way there. The personal computer was brand new. A lot of us were born in an era where we were seeing the personal computer for the very first time. It was uh it was like uh seeing the future uh when maybe for a lot of other parts of the world it was already there. So it was a fun time to grow up there. >> So you studied computer science and eventually you came here to the US for your masters. Why why coming to the US? What what was the deal about coming to the US? I think the the leure of knowing that innovation especially in computer science just naturally felt like this
is the hub of it. So if you're going to do something in that space I think uh this felt like a very natural place to come. It was also um candidly it was a very uh I'll call it fashionable thing to do in the late 90s. It was a place where a lot of engineers from India knew that future careers were going to be made here and this is where the big internet boom was happening and so you wanted to be in the midst of the action. >> So what was it to experience the boom and the bust because right after your masters you joined a telecommunication company that had to shut down you know in the downturn >> you know it is uh it's one of those experiences that shapes you for your life. Um when we were finishing up our masters the telecom boom was at its absolute highest and even as students we could feel the effects of it. Uh we would get recruited by uh different companies small big you
would have great uh packages being offered to you. Uh you know reading the news these days about AI companies and the war for talent. I think we have gone through a version of it in the telecom industry in the late 90s. Similar to the AI engineers today, networking engineers in the late 90s were the much valued talent. And so we saw that and interestingly you know we got these and we all had our preferences. Some of us wanted to always go into startups. Some of uh my friends wanted to go into big companies like Cisco and Juniper. And they all made their choices. And interestingly in the uh December 2020 we all accepted of our job offers finished our degrees and we all went back home to different parts of the world to just go take a two week 3 week break and as we are sitting in our homes we started getting these messages saying it's all melting down the companies are shutting down.
companies are letting people go. You want to check with your uh company if your job even still exists. And here you are a complete fresh grad and you're getting all these messages and you're frantically calling people and saying, "Hey, everything okay?" And you know, in my case, the company was still doing well back then, but we joined. And uh unfortunately, a year later, they ran out of money and we shut down. and you experienced um the highs and the lows in a very very short span as a very young person. So just a fascinating learning experience and uh one that you know a lot of us carry into the hype cycles as they have happened repeatedly in Silicon Valley. >> No kidding. Now for you I mean you continue to be on the telecom um you know arena. In fact you joined Aruba and that was quite the run. you know they ended up getting acquired too by HP. So how was that experience like
and also you know being part of a transaction to certain degree even though you know you were not leading the company like you're leading your own company today you know I'm sure it was quite the uh experience. >> It was um I mean Aruba is probably been the defining experience for me in my career. Um I joined them as a very young and a very early engineer. I was in the first 15 people that uh were in that company and a few things stand out to me I think number one was back in 2002 which is when we were really uh starting the journey at Aruba Wi-Fi was not this common thing that we have all come to appreciate now right and I I I remind people that back in 2002 most of us actually did not even get laptops forget there were no things like iPads. There were nothing called an iPhone. And so you went into the office and you had this desk and it had a huge personal computer and a monitor
and you sat down and you worked on it. And uh here were a set of founders who were saying no no the future of the world is all wireless. And uh it was a leap of faith for all of us to say that world will happen. And we would go to customers and I remember very vividly this very large bank in New York and we were presenting to them that how they should uh deploy Wi-Fi in their entire offices and it was an hourong meeting and the person interrupted me about 10 minutes into my presentation and he said why don't we step out of the conference room and he walked me out and he showed me their office floor and they said Rajiv what do you see and I said has see a bunch of people working on their desks. He said, "Yeah, you're right. Do you see anybody who has anything called a laptop?" I said, "No." I said, "Look, I want all these highly valuable team members of mine to sit on their desks and make
us a lot of money. I don't need them to move around. I don't need them to walk back home that night with a laptop and I am scared all night of what data has just been leaked out of my office." So we will never do wireless in this place. This is 2003 and here we are as a company betting the future that the whole world is going to go wireless. So you know it's such an interesting experience that there are these moments that really test your conviction on where the future will go. And I have to give credit to the founders and the management team of that company Aruba. you know people like uh Ki uh Dominic or who really held their conviction in the face of that and said no no no the future will happen and it is impossible to know when is Apple going to release a product like an iPad or a MacBook Air you don't know that you're just making a leap of faith so more than anything else Aruba
really was a lesson in that that sometimes you don't know the timing of these things Sometimes the world is going to tell you that it's impossible and you as an entrepreneur, you as a founding team have to just keep the faith and keep the journey alive. So great experience. We went public in 2007. Uh we had our ups and downs as a publicly traded stock. Uh and eventually in 2016 as you said HP acquired us. And so seeing every version of that uh journey from the super early days being public dealing with Wall Street scrutiny as a team um eventually seeing HP acquires I think it is uh was quite an experience. >> So then what happened right after because then you went to federated wireless which was you know the ultimate immediate step before you becoming an entrepreneur. >> Yeah. You know, one of the things um during that long journey at Aruba, I was very blessed that I think
the management team and the leadership there at Aruba recognized that while the company Aruba was growing, there were some of us who thrived in really new small growing environment. So I consistently was able to get roles at Aruba to really go off and do new product lines, new business units rather than um building at scale, which is a very different function. So once HP acquired us, we knew that anything we were doing at Aruba was just going to become 100x in scale. And so that was never a great fit for what I love doing and where my strengths were. So that led me to start looking to say what's out there and at the back of my head with about 15 years of uh enterprise wireless experience was a thought that said uh why is it that the enterprises only use Wi-Fi? Why do we never use the cellular 4G 5G technology that we all use in our personal lives? Why are we not able to bring that? And
um you know…