Kannan Kothandaraman

Co-Founder & CEO Selector

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Kannan Kothandaraman is co-founder and chief executive of Selector, a Santa Clara company that applies large language models, knowledge graphs and causal reasoning to the problem of working out why a network broke. He and Nitin Kumar founded it in 2019, both leaving senior roles at Juniper Networks, on the argument that enterprises were drowning in vertically siloed monitoring tools that each reported symptoms and none of which could name a cause. The company has since sold that argument to Fortune 20 telecom, manufacturing and healthcare operators, doubled its annual recurring revenue four years running, and in February 2026 raised $32 million at a $375 million valuation.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Selector in 2019 with Nitin Kumar, now the company’s CTO, and has led it as chief executive throughout.
• Raised $32 million in February 2026 in a round led by AVP with Ansa Capital, Two Bear Capital, Sinewave Ventures and Singtel Innov8, doubling Selector’s valuation to $375 million; the round followed a $33 million Series B in November 2024 led by Ansa Capital that took total funding past $66 million.
• Reported cumulative annual recurring revenue at 230% of 2024 levels — a fourth consecutive year of doubling — and new ARR booked at 370% of the prior year, with roughly 80% of customers now Fortune 1000 organizations and three new Fortune 20 customers added across manufacturing and healthcare.
• Announced eight foundational US patents in January 2026 covering causal inference, large language model training, AI-powered correlation, predictive maintenance and network path intelligence.
• Expanded Selector into Japan through partnerships with Net One Systems and Ranger Systems, and onto the AWS and Microsoft Azure marketplaces, during late 2025.
• Spent more than thirteen years in senior leadership at Juniper Networks, including as Vice President of Product Line Management, after beginning his career as an engineer at Cisco Systems.

Professional Journey

Kothandaraman’s career began in networking hardware and systems software at Cisco Systems, where he built a foundation in large-scale networking. He moved to Juniper Networks and spent more than thirteen years there in senior leadership, ultimately running product line management across the company’s operating system and software portfolio and its edge and data-centre routing lines — the products that carry service-provider and large-enterprise traffic, and therefore the products whose failures are most expensive.

That vantage point supplied the founding thesis for Selector. Operators had accumulated one monitoring tool per domain — network, application, cloud, device — each producing its own alerts, and no layer that correlated across them. In 2019 he and Nitin Kumar, another Juniper executive, left to build one. Selector’s platform ingests telemetry horizontally across the stack and applies causal reasoning, knowledge graphs and a domain-specific language model so that operators can ask in plain language what changed and be given a root cause rather than a wall of alarms.

The company has been recognised by Gartner in multiple Hype Cycle reports for its AIOps and event intelligence work and has been built with a team drawn from Juniper, Uber, Meta, Cisco, Nutanix and VMware. Commercially, the pattern has been steady compounding: four consecutive years of doubling annual recurring revenue, cumulative ARR in 2025 reaching 230% of 2024 levels, new bookings at 370% of the prior year, and around four-fifths of customers now Fortune 1000 companies. Through late 2025 Kothandaraman pushed the company into Japan with two integrator partnerships and onto the AWS and Azure marketplaces, and added a channel partner programme.

In January 2026 the US Patent and Trademark Office granted Selector eight foundational patents, and the following month investors led by AVP put in a further $32 million at a $375 million valuation — double the company’s previous mark. Kothandaraman framed the round in terms of where the buying had come from: Fortune 20 and Fortune 1000 organizations moving off fragmented monitoring toward a single correlated view. He also writes on network operations and agentic AI as a member of the Forbes Technology Council.

Education

No education was established for this profile. The degrees previously recorded traced only to aggregator listings, one of which labels its own entry unverified, and neither Selector’s own materials nor his self-authored professional biography names a university or degree. Rather than restate an unsourced claim, the field is left empty; the removed values are recorded in the internal verification notes so they can be restored if a primary source is found.