Keyur Patel

Founder and CTO Arrcus Inc.

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Keyur Patel is a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Arrcus, the networking software company he started in 2016 with Devesh Garg and Derek Yeung. He is unusual among startup CTOs in that his influence is measurable in the public record of the internet’s own machinery: he has authored or co-authored thirty-four published RFCs between 2006 and 2025, has well over a hundred Internet-Drafts to his name, and currently chairs the Inter-Domain Routing working group at the IETF — the body that governs BGP, the protocol that holds the internet’s routing table together. He came to Arrcus from Cisco, where he was a Distinguished Engineer working on exactly that layer, and before that from two routing startups. Arrcus exists to make the network operating system independent of the box it runs on, a proposition made possible by the arrival of capable merchant silicon and made commercially interesting by the cost of the alternative.

Career Highlights

• Co-founder and CTO of Arrcus, founded in 2016 with chief executive Devesh Garg and fellow founder Derek Yeung.
• Chair of the IETF Inter-Domain Routing (IDR) working group and technical adviser to the SIDR Operations (SIDROPS) working group.
• Author or co-author of 34 published RFCs from 2006 to 2025, plus 20 active and 108 expired Internet-Drafts.
• Holder of more than fifty patents across interdomain routing and security, fast re-route, network service chaining, Layer 2 protocols, IPv6, TCP, VPNs and routing virtualisation.
• Former Distinguished Engineer at Cisco, where he architected BGP extensions, BGP NSR, L3VPNs, L2VPNs, EVPNs, MVPNs, segment routing, the RPKI RTR protocol and routing analytics.
• Senior engineering positions at AYR Networks, later acquired by Cisco, and Tasman Networks, later acquired by Nortel.
• More than twenty years of experience delivering complex networking projects at both startups and large public companies.

Professional Journey

Patel’s career started at the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute, where he worked as a research assistant — ISI being, not incidentally, one of the institutions most closely bound up with the early development of the internet’s protocols. He moved from there into industry at two routing startups, AYR Networks and Tasman Networks, holding senior engineering positions responsible for the design and development of unicast and multicast routing protocols, routing infrastructure and Layer 2 protocols. Both companies were acquired: AYR by Cisco, Tasman by Nortel.

At Cisco he became a Distinguished Engineer, the company’s senior individual-contributor grade, and spent the bulk of his career there on routing and VPN architecture. The list of what he worked on reads as a fair summary of what carriers and large enterprises actually deploy — critical modifications to BGP, BGP non-stop routing, L3 and L2 VPNs, EVPNs, MVPNs, segment routing, the RPKI RTR protocol used to validate route origins, interdomain security, routing policy and routing analytics. Much of that work has a public counterpart in the IETF record, where his first RFC dates from 2006 and the most recent from 2025, on BGP link-state SPF routing.

Arrcus was founded in 2016, after Patel was introduced to Devesh Garg by a mutual acquaintance. Garg brought a different kind of background — he had led EZchip through its acquisition by Mellanox, founded Tilera, served as a managing director at Bessemer Venture Partners and been a pre-IPO employee at Broadcom — and the pair, joined by Derek Yeung, saw an opening created by merchant silicon. If the switching chips were becoming commodities, the operating system need not be bound to a single vendor’s hardware. Arrcus built a hardware-agnostic network operating system for data centre, edge and multi-cloud deployment, standards-based on OpenConfig and YANG, with IP routing at scale, SRv6 segment routing for 5G infrastructure and multi-cloud connectivity as its principal selling points. As of a December 2020 interview with the two founders, the company had raised 49 million dollars, employed approaching a hundred people, and counted Verizon among its deployments.

Patel’s standing in the standards community has continued to grow alongside the company. He served for a period as co-chair of SIDROPS, the working group concerned with the operational side of routing security, and now holds the chair of IDR itself while remaining a technical adviser to SIDROPS. IDR is the working group where changes to BGP are argued out and ratified; chairing it is among the more significant positions available to a working routing engineer, and it is held on personal standing rather than on behalf of an employer.

Education

University of Southern California

MS, Computer Engineering

He began his career at USC’s Information Sciences Institute as a research assistant. No undergraduate institution or degree is named in any source located.