Team

Ofer Bengal

Ofer is a serial entrepreneur who has founded and led several companies in the areas of data communications, telecommunications, Internet, homeland security and medical devices. Ofer was founder & CEO of RIT Technologies (NASDAQ: RITT), a provider of sophisticated telecommunications and data communications systems to major world carriers. He began his career as an aerospace engineer in the Israeli Air Force and then built his own aerospace engineering consulting firm. As a hobby, he has also invented, developed and licensed toy concepts to companies such as Milton Bradley, Hasbro and Tomy.

Ofer holds a Bachelor of Science (cum laude) in aerospace engineering from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Yiftach Shoolman

Yiftach is an experienced technologist, having held leadership engineering and product roles in diverse fields from application acceleration, cloud computing and software-as-a-service (SaaS), to broadband networks and metro networks. He was the founder, president and CTO of Crescendo Networks (acquired by F5, NASDAQ:FFIV), the vice president of software development at Native Networks (acquired by Alcatel, NASDAQ: ALU) and part of the founding team at ECI Telecom broadband division, where he served as vice president of software engineering.

Yiftach holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics and Computer Science and has completed studies for Master of Science in Computer Science at Tel-Aviv University.

Salvatore Sanfilippo

Salvatore started his career in 1997 as a security researcher, writing the hping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hping) security tool and inventing the Idle Scan (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idle_scan). Later he worked on embedded systems, focusing on programming languages research and creating a small footprint Tcl interpreter, which is still in active development. With a colleague, Salvatore created the first two Italian social applications in partnership with Telecom Italia. After this experience, he decided to explore new ways to improve web app development, and ended up writing the first alpha version of Redis and open sourcing it. Since 2009, he has dedicated most of his time to developing Redis open source code.

Over the years, Salvatore has also created a number of other open source projects ranging from software defined radio, to line editing tools, to children development environments. He lives in Sicily, Italy.

Jason Forget

Jason is a seasoned go-to-market leader with a track record of building multinational sales teams and driving revenue growth. Over the past fifteen years, he has served in several global sales, marketing, services and operations leadership positions in private and public technology companies. Most recently, he was senior vice president of worldwide field operations at Imperva (NYSE: IMPV). As part of the IPO executive team, Jason was responsible for building the “sales machine” that grew sales from $1M to $225M. Prior to this, he held senior sales leadership roles at IMlogic (acquired by Symantec, NASDAQ: SYMC) and Netegrity (acquired by CA, NASDAQ: CA). Jason holds a Master of Business Administration from Bentley University and a Bachelor of Science in finance and marketing from Northeastern University.

Rafael Torres

Rafael has served as a CFO for the past eighteen years.  He has experience scaling companies in the Semiconductor, Networking, Storage and Software industries.  Most recently Rafael was the CFO of Instart, an Enterprise SaaS company in the digital experience space.  Prior to Instart, Rafael held CFO roles at PLX Technology (Nasdaq: PLXT, Acquired by Avago), Power Integrations (Nasdaq: POWI) and OCZ Storage (Nasdaq: OCZ, Acquired by Toshiba).  Since 2013, Rafael has served as board member and audit chair for Ubiquiti (Nasdaq: UBNT).

Rafael holds a B.S. degree in Accounting from Santa Clara University and is a CPA (non-active) attained through his experience at PriceWaterhouse.

Alvin Richards

Alvin has held various executive roles, most recently as the field chief technology officer at MariaDB, vice president of product at Aerospike and engineering lead at MongoDB. He has worked with SasS startups, enterprise storage (NetApp) and byte-code virtualization and containers (Docker). Alvin’s early experience as a software engineer at Oracle provided a springboard for his career success building and leading engineering teams across the globe.

Alvin holds a computer science degree from Thames Valley University and a Bachelor of Arts in photography from Nottingham Trent University, both in Great Britain.

Itai Raz

Itai is a technology enthusiast who brings over seventeen years of experience, both technical and business-oriented, to Redis Labs’ R&D team. Itai was one of Redis Lab’s first employees, and as VP of Product, he established Redis Lab’s Product Management team to optimize the process of shaping Redis Labs’ products.
Itai began his career as a software developer at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems LTD, and then joined Intel Corp. as a software architect. Later, as a member of Microsoft’s Product Management team, Itai helped launch Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform. He managed business development and sales at U.S. consulting company, Neudesic LLC, and led Customer Success at BreezoMeter, a small Israeli startup. He has also tried his luck at founding his own startup.

Itai holds a BSc degree in Information System from the Technion – Israel institute of Technology, and an MBA from Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School of Business.

Adi Stern

Adi has over ten years of experience managing recruitment and HR processes in the high tech industry. She brings vast experience supporting rapid growth and leading change within startup environments. Prior to joining Redis Labs, she served as an HR specialist and recruitment manager at PrimeSense (acquired by Apple), PTC (NSDAQ: PTMC) and Tripletec. Adi holds both a Bachelor of Arts in psychology and literature and a Master of Business Administration, specializing in information systems, from Bar-Ilan University.

Mike Anand

Mike has spent more than 15 years building, pitching, and growing products at various stages of many successful companies. His passion for customer experience and storytelling led him on a journey deep into Product Marketing, starting with AppDynamics (acquired by Cisco for almost $4B) where he played a critical role in transforming the story of application analytics into business performance. Most recently, Mike led Product Marketing for the Amazon Web Services Observability Portfolio (Amazon CloudWatch and AWS X-Ray) and then for AWS Container Services.

Mike holds a B.S. from UC Davis and an MBA from Santa Clara University.

Mike Kwon

Mike Kwon is a seasoned marketing executive with more than 13 years of experience at high-growth enterprise technology companies. Before joining Redis Labs, Mike built and led the demand function at SignalFx, which experienced tremendous revenue growth, eventually leading to an acquisition by Splunk for $1.05B. Before that, Mike held senior marketing positions at Nutanix (Nasdaq: NTNX) and Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW), where he played a critical role in scaling the demand generation engine that fueled these companies from pre-IPO to more than $1B in revenue.

Mike holds a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from San Jose State University.

Jim Welch

Jim is a proven technology sales leader with a fifteen-year track record of success selling hardware, software, services and SaaS solutions to large enterprises across North America. Most recently as vice president of cloud security sales at Imperva Inc., he was responsible for building the team and go-to-market strategy for a $45M SaaS business. Prior to that, Jim managed Imperva’s North American strategic account teams to ten straight quarters of double-digit revenue growth. He also held positions at IBM and Crossbeam, where he was responsible for driving the cybersecurity business across several industries.

Jim holds a Bachelor of Science in marketing from LaSalle University and a Master of Business Administration from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Stéphane Dubois

Stéphane is a well-known growth generator in EMEA with a track record of launching teams and initiatives for driving revenue growth across European markets. For the last 20 years he has served in similar positions in consulting and technology organizations such as Logica (now CGI), Nuance, and Experian. Most recently he was the South Europe area Vice President at Pivotal, where he helped create and grow its business from a startup to a market leader. Stéphane graduated from the Skema Business school in France.

Guy Korland

Guy has over 15 years of experience in software development, with key roles in team leadership and consultancies. Most recently, as the CTO of SelfPoint, he was responsible for building a high-end e-commerce SaaS solution. Previously, he was the founding CTO of shopetti, an online shopping app. Guy also served as vice president of research & development at GigaSpaces Technologies, where he managed the development of the XAP and Cloudily product lines.

Guy holds Bachelor of Arts and Master of Science degrees in computer science from the Technion, Israel institute of Technology, and a PhD from Tel Aviv University.

Oren Yaqobi

Oren is a highly technical and customer-oriented individual, helping companies get more value with less effort. Previously, he managed the support team at OpTier, a leader in application performance management, where he spent years with global customers both on-site and off-site.

Oren holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Haifa in computer science and philosophy. In his nonexistent spare time he plays the keyboard in jazz and blues bands.

Gabe Stanek

Gabe has spent twenty years helping companies around the world realize significant value from technical solutions powered by leading Relational and NoSQL database technologies. He is a hands-on technologist with tenures at Sybase, Oracle and Neo Technology (the creators of the Neo4j graph database). He and his teams have helped a wide variety of companies—from the Global Fortune 100 to Silicon Valley startups—architect, develop and deploy internal and large-scale customer applications. At Redis Labs, Gabe continues to focus on driving successful customer solutions with a brilliant team of Solution Architects, helping ensure that customers view us as the go-to technical experts for designing and deploying Redis-based solutions.
Gabe holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from San Jose State University and is officially certified in a number of technologies including Oracle and Neo4j.

Yaron Dolev

Yaron has twenty-five years of experience in IT management, and is an expert in mission critical systems and information security. His background includes management positions, as well as hands-on experience in various IT domains. Prior to Redis Labs, he served as head of global IT at Fundtech (NASDAQ: FNDT), where he led the company’s global IT team.

He holds a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification.