Aaref Hilaly
Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
Aaref Hilaly
Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
San Francisco, California
Overview
Work Experience
Partner
2020 - Current
BCV helps technical founders build businesses around their ideas. We invest early (seed / Series A), and commit -- working closely with founders on recruiting, early customers, messaging, launch and scale. Our team brings deep domain expertise in AI, cloud infrastructure, fin-tech, and more, and taps the unique network and portfolio of Bain Capital.
Seed Investor + Board Member
2023
Contextual is a platform for bringing large language models (LLMs) into the enterprise, by addressing issues such as hallucination and attribution. The technology is inspired by the founders' seminal work on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at Facebook AI Research.
Seed Investor + Board Member
2022
Cleanlab improves the quality of text, tabular and image data used to train large language models (LLMs). The company started with a widely-adopted open-source tool to diagnose data quality issues. It recently added a paid, closed-source offering (Cleanlab Studio) to programmatically address those issues.
Seed Investor + Board Member
2021
Momento is an intelligent, serverless cache that any developer can build into her app within five minutes. It instantly scales to millions of TPS with enterprise-grade availability and security, without any configurations. The founders previously built AWS DynamoDB from inception to over a billion in revenue.
Seed Investor + Board Member
2021
Felt is a simple, delightful, browser-first mapping app that lets its users think in maps. With Felt, anyone can create a beautiful map in minutes through pre-built templates and easy-to-access data sets, and then share them publicly or privately.
Seed & Series A Investor + Board Member
2012
Clari's revenue operations platform has become the way many sales leaders run their business. It complements Salesforce to provide actionable forecasts, pipeline management and activity intelligence.
Partner
2012 - 2019
General Partner focused on Seed / Early. Over seven years, I invested in, and served on the boards of, a dozen companies. Two went public (Guardant Health, MobileIron), one is a unicorn (Clari), three were acquired for ~$1 billion each (Lightstep (ServiceNow), Skyhigh (McAfee), ThousandEyes (Cisco)), and a couple were total disasters. Privileged to learn venture investing from some of the best in the business.
Vice President, Engineering
2011 - 2012
Joined Symantec through its acquisition of Clearwell and served for a year on the leadership team.
President & CEO
2005 - 2011
Led company from the early stages of product development to over $100m in ARR within 6 years, growing 80% YoY. Raised a total of $33m from Sequoia (seed & Series A) and Redpoint (Series B). Burned a cumulative $25m to reach profitability. Clearwell was the leading e-discovery software (legal-tech) company for enterprises and government agencies. Symantec acquired Clearwell in 2011 for $410 million.
Founder & CEO
2000 - 2003
My first startup! CenterRun pioneered data center automation. We raised Series A from Sequoia, grew to 30 people and $5 million in revenue, and then sold the company (too early) to Sun Microsystems for $66 million.