Kam Eshghi

Co-Founder Lightbits Labs

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Kam Eshghi is one of six co-founders of Lightbits Labs, the San Jose company that set out in 2016 to solve a problem the storage industry had been circling for years: NVMe made flash fast enough that the network became the bottleneck, and the existing answer — NVMe over Fabrics running on RDMA — required specialised networking hardware that most data centres did not have and did not want. Lightbits’ bet was that NVMe could be run over ordinary TCP/IP on standard Ethernet, trading a little latency for the ability to deploy on infrastructure everyone already owned. The company co-developed that protocol, NVM Express approved it as a standard in November 2019, and Lightbits shipped the first commercial implementation. Eshghi’s role in that was commercial rather than technical: as Chief Strategy Officer he ran business development, strategic marketing and solutions engineering, and built the alliance and channel relationships — Intel, VMware, Cisco, AWS, AMD — that a storage-software company needs in order to be sold by other people. It is work he had done before at DSSD, where the EMC partnership he built ended in EMC acquiring the company for $1 billion. He now sits on Lightbits’ advisory board.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Lightbits Labs in 2016 with Avigdor Willenz, Eran Kirzner, Muli Ben-Yehuda, Ofir Efrati and Fabian Trumper, on $10 million of initial funding.
• Lightbits co-developed the NVMe/TCP protocol, approved as a standard by NVM Express in November 2019, and released the first commercial NVMe/TCP storage platform.
• As Chief Strategy Officer, led business development, strategic marketing and solutions engineering, with alliance and multi-channel programmes spanning Intel, VMware, Cisco, AWS and AMD.
• Named a CRN Channel Chief in 2022.
• As vice president of strategic alliances at DSSD, developed and managed the partnership with EMC that led to EMC’s $1 billion acquisition of the company.
• Built the NVMe controller business at Integrated Device Technology from a startup effort into a market-leading position.
• Led strategy and architecture teams at Intel covering server chipsets and Ethernet switches.
• Advises technology startups, including companies subsequently acquired by major technology firms.
• Now serves on Lightbits Labs’ advisory board.

Professional Journey

Eshghi’s career has been spent at the junction between silicon and the data centre, in roles that translate deep technical capability into commercial position. At Intel he led architecture and product-planning teams working on server chipsets and Ethernet switches — components whose success depends less on raw performance than on ecosystem adoption, which is a formative lesson for someone who would spend the rest of his career in alliances and channel.

He then went to Integrated Device Technology, where he built the NVMe controller business from a startup effort inside the company into a leading position. That is the point at which his career and the NVMe story converge. NVMe was reorganising storage around the idea that flash should not be spoken to as though it were a disk, and IDT was building the controllers that made it work.

From components he moved to systems, joining DSSD as vice president of strategic alliances. DSSD was one of the most ambitious storage startups of its era, building a rack-scale flash appliance, and Eshghi’s job was the partnership with EMC. That relationship ended in EMC acquiring DSSD for roughly $1 billion — an outcome in which the alliance was not incidental but the mechanism.

In 2016 he co-founded Lightbits Labs with five others, including the serial semiconductor entrepreneur Avigdor Willenz, who became chairman, and Eran Kirzner, who became chief executive. The technical proposition was NVMe/TCP: disaggregate storage from compute, deliver NVMe performance across a standard Ethernet network with no special NICs or switches, and let cloud and enterprise operators build shared storage on commodity infrastructure. The protocol was co-developed with the standards community and approved by NVM Express in November 2019, and Lightbits shipped the first commercial platform built on it.

As Chief Strategy Officer, Eshghi’s mandate covered business development, strategic marketing and solutions engineering. The alliance list he assembled reads as a map of how software-defined storage actually reaches customers — Intel, which also invested in the company in September 2020 and partnered with it on disaggregated storage; VMware and Cisco, whose platforms the storage has to slot into; AWS; and AMD. CRN named him a Channel Chief in 2022, recognition specifically for channel programme leadership rather than for general executive performance.

The company around him has continued to raise and to broaden: $50 million in March 2019 from investors including Dell EMC, Cisco and Micron; $42 million in June 2022 with JP Morgan Chase participating; and a Lenovo Group investment in October 2022. More recently Lightbits has pushed into AI infrastructure with Inferra, a key-value cache acceleration engine aimed at the GPU memory constraint in inference workloads, alongside its established software-defined block storage product.

Eshghi no longer appears on the company’s executive roster. Lightbits’ own published leadership page lists him on the advisory board as a co-founder, alongside advisers drawn from AWS, VMware, HPE, Intel, Dell, Cisco and Nutanix. He has also advised other technology startups, including some subsequently acquired by major technology companies.

Education

No education could be established for Kam Eshghi from any primary source. Lightbits Labs publishes none for him, and neither does his own self-authored council profile. A biography circulating in secondary listings describes him as a Berkeley and MIT graduate holding a master’s in electrical engineering and computer science and an MBA, but does not state which degree was taken at which institution and is not attributable to a primary source, so it is not published here.