TJ

Tyler Jewell

CEO & President at Lightbend

Palo Alto, California

Overview 

Tyler Jewell is the CEO at Lightbend, overseeing the company's success in developing applications that remain responsive to change. With a background in executive roles at companies like Oracle and Symantec, he has successfully led Lightbend through significant growth and secured investments in notable companies like Orion Labs and Sauce Labs.

Work Experience 

  • CEO & President

    2023 - Current

    Akka applications are elastic services that stay responsive by adapting to any external event – idleness, spikes, end user location, maintenance, or failures. F500 and at-scale startups have downloaded Akka over 1 billion times. Akka is relied upon when application data or users becomes gigantic: - Transactional Apps (embed in-memory databases): Tesco, Starbucks, WebEx, Lloyd’s Bank - AI Apps (inference for AI models): Swiggy, Tubi, ING, CapitalOne - Digital Twin Apps (converge replicated data): Norwegian Cruise Lines, Reflek.io, bp, Volkswagen - Analytics Apps (analyze real-time data points): Booking.com, Westpac, HPE, Amprion - Streaming Apps (process continuous data): Disney, Dream11, eero, Workday - Edge Apps (daisy chain device-to-cloud data): General Motors, B/S/H/, John Deere, Tesla - Event Sourced Apps (track and replay state): Ciena, Walmart, Sky, Gebit - Backend for Frontend Apps (attach micro-frontend APIs): Adobe, Verizon, RBC, USAA With Akka, developers build apps once and then scale through every elasticity barrier without rewrites or downtime. Akka applications guarantee resilience and deliver nearly infinite performance. Akka apps auto-scale while placing R-W replicas in 100s of POPs to be near users. Akka canaries, rebalances, and repartitions application workloads to enable no-downtime maintenance events. Akka recovers, migrates and replicates workloads to handle any potential failure. We are backed by Dell Tech Capital, Intel Capital, Juniper Networks, IBM, and Greylock.

  • Partner

    2012

    Board: - Sauce Labs (exited to PE, 2017) - WSO2 (acquired by EQT, Q2 '24) - Codenvy (acquired by RHT, Q2 '17) - Cloudant (acquired by IBM, Q1 '14) Angel: - SourceGraph (exited in 2015 secondary) - ZeroTurnaround (acq. by Roguewave, Q4 '17) - InfoQ.com (exited in 2017 through secondary) - AppHarbor (acquired by MSFT, Q4 '14) Advisor: - Security Compass (acquired by PE, Q4 '19) - Tomitribe (apache support) Toba Capital's partners are proven operators with expertise in IT infrastructure. Many of our partners continue as active CEOs, bringing a unique blend of market depth and support to our portfolio companies.

Toba Capital is an investment firm committed to helping create incredible technology companies.

  • Managing Director

    2019 - 2023

    Board: - NS1 (smart network services acq. by IBM) - Lightbend (app elasticity without rewrites or downtime) - Loops.ai (operational intelligence) - Archipelo (developer security posture management) - Orion Labs (digital push-to-talk acq. by Modaxo) Observer: - Zingly (rethinking the contact us box) - CUE Labs (CUE configuration language) - Oxeye Security (cloud native app sec acq. by Gitlab) - AppMap (personalized dev observability) Advisor: Yugabyte, Tetrate, Minio, Fly.io. I've invested as a VC and angel $150M across 17 companies with 12 exits (woohoo!). As an operator, I built product organizations and was a 3-time CEO/COO. I am a geek and domain expert in developer tools, dev{sec|net|git}ops, infrastructure, developer platforms, and open-source licensing. I'm knowledgeably dangerous (mostly to myself) in analytics, business intelligence, big data, cloud computing, and systems management. At DTC, I am working on early stage and growth investments. Entrepreneurs enjoy collaborating with me on their product market fit, go-to-market, unlocking strategic markets, building and scaling organizations, and leadership challenges. My partners are enterprise operators and investors who are experts in enterprise systems with degrees in Computer Science or Electrical Engineering coupled with long track records of investing in and actively supporting emerging companies. We invest in disruptive enterprise businesses including Silicon, Storage, Networking, DevOps, IoT, Mobile Computing, Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Big Data, ML/AI, and Analytics.

Dell Technologies Capital is a VC arm of Dell Technologies that invests in enterprise and cloud infrastructure.

  • CEO

    2017 - 2019

    Leading the passionate and amazing people at WSO2. Founded in 2005, WSO2 is the world's #1 open source integration vendor, helping digitally-driven organizations become integration agile. Brand name customers choose us for our broad, integrated platform, approach to open source, and agile transformation methodology. With offices in Australia, Brazil, Sri Lanka, UK, Germany and USA, WSO2 employs over 600 professionals. 1,000’s of global projects execute over 6 trillion transactions annually with WSO2.

WSO2 enables organizations to create awesome digital experiences quickly, easily, and securely

Raised $133,500,000.00 from Redstart Labs and Goldman Sachs.

  • CEO & Founder

    2012 - 2017

    Codenvy was acquired by Red Hat in June 2017! Codenvy makes cloud workspaces for development teams. 45 employees and $10M in venture capital raised from Toba Capital and Auriga Ventures.

Codenvy is a provider of a cloud development platform designed for coding, building and testing applications.

Raised $9,000,000.00 from Toba Capital and Heavybit.

  • VP, Oracle Public Cloud

    2011 - 2012

    A combination of SAAS and PAAS businesses that are offered in a self-service, elastic environment on a subscription basis generating more than $1B in annual revenue.

Oracle is an integrated cloud application and platform services that sells a range of enterprise information technology solutions.

  • VP & Investment Manager

    2005 - 2011

    Lead investments tied to innovation strategies in the application development, application server, lifecycle management, and SAAS markets. Investments include WSO2 (board), ZeroTurnaround, AppHarbor, AwayFind, rule.fm and Skydera. Directed product teams for Java, ERP, monitoring, virtualization, and cloud businesses. Oversaw businesses with $150M in revs. Drove a number of acquisitions and new product launches.

we building the software that makes the benefits of new technology real while empowering users and data, m the inside out.

  • COO/CEO

    2003 - 2004

    Ran a media subsidiary of Veritas prior to the acquisition by Symantec. We published TheServerSide.com, a tabloid and research community for enterprise Java and .NET with over a million subscribers. Led the divestiture from Veritas and sale to TechTarget where TSS still operates 20 years later!

Email Filtering Company

Raised $35,000,000.00 from TCV, Crosslink Capital, NortonLifeLock, Critical Path, Accel, Opportunity Capital Partners, Esther Dyson, Bill Joy and Thomas Weisel Partners.

  • Director

    1997 - 2003

    Various technical positions in marketing, products and services.

BEA provides enterprise application and service infrastructure software enabling companies to streamline operations and cut costs.

Raised $50,000,000.00 from Alfred Chuang and Warburg Pincus.

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