Sirish Raghuram

Co-Founder, Chief Growth Officer Platform9 Systems

Last Reviewed: September 19, 2026

Executive Summary

Sirish Raghuram co-founded Platform9 with two fellow early VMware engineers on a bet that private infrastructure would not die, but would have to be consumed like public cloud to survive. The company’s software takes servers an organisation already owns and presents them as a full-featured private cloud — self-service provisioning, elastic allocation, Kubernetes, a control plane someone else operates — so that an enterprise gets the cloud experience without the cloud bill or the data-residency compromise. Raghuram led the company as founding chief executive from inception through its early product, revenue and fundraising milestones, and moved to Chief Growth Officer in October 2023 when Ravi Jacob, previously the company’s chief financial officer and before that a corporate vice president and treasurer at Intel, became chief executive. The strategic position that once looked contrarian has become the company’s principal opportunity: after Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware and the licensing changes that followed, a company founded by VMware engineers, selling in-place migration off vSphere, found itself in exactly the right place. Platform9 was named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms.

Career Highlights

• Co-founded Platform9 Systems with Madhura Maskasky and Roopak Parikh, all early VMware engineers, and served as founding chief executive.
• Led the company from inception through its team, product, revenue and fundraising milestones before transitioning to Chief Growth Officer, where he focuses on growth engineering and shortening customer time-to-value.
• Handed the chief executive role to Ravi Jacob in October 2023 while remaining on the executive team alongside his two co-founders.
• Platform9 was named a Visionary in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms and a Major Player in the July 2026 IDC MarketScape for private and hybrid cloud management.
• Platform9 launched Private Cloud Director in October 2024, the vJailbreak in-place vSphere cluster migration tool, Platform9 OS — a KVM-ready Linux distribution aimed at VMware administrators — in May 2026, and a Cloud Solution Provider programme for VMware partners in June 2026.
• Platform9 powered a Fortune 500 migration of more than 40,000 virtual machines, announced in August 2025.
• Was an early engineer at VMware, progressing into technical and management roles that produced several products, features and patents.
• Published on cloud economics and enterprise infrastructure through the fee-based Forbes Technology Council between 2018 and 2022.

Professional Journey

Raghuram’s career began at VMware, early enough to have worked on the virtualisation layer while it was still remaking the data centre rather than defending an installed base. He moved from engineering into technical and management roles, and his work there produced several shipped products and features and a number of patents. Two of his colleagues from that period, Madhura Maskasky and Roopak Parikh, became his co-founders.

The three left to found Platform9 on a thesis that ran against the prevailing direction of travel. The consensus in the mid-2010s was that enterprise workloads would migrate wholesale to public cloud and that private infrastructure was a legacy problem to be managed down. Platform9’s counter-argument was that the reason people wanted public cloud was the consumption model — self-service, elasticity, someone else running the control plane — and not the physical location of the servers, and that the consumption model could be delivered on infrastructure the customer already owned. The product was therefore a SaaS-managed control plane for private infrastructure: Platform9 operates the management layer, the customer keeps the hardware and the data.

Raghuram ran the company as founding chief executive through that period, taking it through the fundraising and go-to-market build-out and through the successive waves of the infrastructure market — OpenStack, then Kubernetes, then the general retrenchment as enterprises discovered what public cloud costs at scale. His public writing in those years tracked the same argument, including a January 2022 piece asking whether cloud neutrality would become the next net neutrality, framing hyperscaler pricing power as a structural rather than a commercial problem.

In October 2023 the chief executive role passed to Ravi Jacob, who had been the company’s chief financial officer and had previously been a corporate vice president and treasurer at Intel — a profile suited to scaling operations and financial discipline. Raghuram moved to Chief Growth Officer, concentrating on growth engineering and on accelerating customer time-to-value rather than on running the company day to day. His two co-founders likewise hold functional executive roles, as chief product officer and chief technology officer.

The change of chief executive coincided almost exactly with the event that transformed the company’s market. Broadcom completed its acquisition of VMware in late 2023 and restructured its licensing and partner programmes, and a large population of enterprises that had never seriously considered leaving vSphere began to. Platform9’s response has been methodical and, given its founders’ history, unusually credible: Private Cloud Director launched in October 2024 as the destination platform; vJailbreak converts entire vSphere clusters in place rather than requiring a parallel build; Platform9 OS, released in May 2026, packages a KVM-ready Linux distribution specifically for administrators whose skills are in VMware; and a Cloud Solution Provider programme launched in June 2026 to recruit VMware’s own channel. The results have been visible in both customer scale — a Fortune 500 migration of more than 40,000 virtual machines announced in August 2025 — and analyst positioning, with a Visionary placement in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Server Virtualization Platforms and Major Player status in the July 2026 IDC MarketScape.

Education

No education could be established for Sirish Raghuram from any primary source. Platform9 publishes none for him and neither does his own self-authored council profile. The single degree claim located came from a contact-data aggregator and was not independently corroborated; it is recorded in the internal verification notes as a lead for a future pass rather than published here.