Management Team

Lightwire has a strong and proven management team including extraordinary individual and team-based research and product development contributors, proven communications and optical product design managers and an executive team experienced in moving technology from R&D into high-volume production products. The team has successfully managed the development and market introduction of multiple communications, storage and optical products during the past 10 years.

Ameesh Divatia , President and Chief Executive Officer

Ameesh Divatia came to Lightwire in October 2009 after serving as an Executive Advisor since October 2008. Ameesh has over 20 years of experience in the enterprise networking, service provider infrastructure and enterprise storage markets. From May 2006 to September of 2008, he was Senior Vice President and General Manager of Intelligent Network Products at Emulex Corporation. Ameesh came to Emulex as a result of the company’s acquisition of Aarohi Communications. He was Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Aarohi Communications since its inception in April 2001 and was responsible for establishing Aarohi as a successful player in the storage virtualization and converged fabric space. Prior to joining Aarohi, he was Chief Product Strategist for the optical transport business unit at Cisco Systems. Ameesh came to Cisco in December 1998 through the acquisition of PipeLinks, Inc, a company he founded in July 1996 and was its Chief Technology Officer. Ameesh received a Master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from UC Irvine and earned his Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the M. S. University of Baroda.

Kal Shastri, Ph.D., Founder and Chief Technology Officer

Kal Shastri is a serial entrepreneur, an angel investor and an incubator of startups. Kal founded Lightwire, Inc. in 2002, and continues to drive the vision and the strategy of the company. In the past, Kal has served on the boards of Photuris, OptronX, Circadiant Systems, and Smart Bridges. He received his Ph. D. in Physics from Columbia University in May, 1985 and M. Sc. in Physics from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Kanpur in May, 1976.

From 1985 to 1997, Kal worked at AT&T Bell Laboratories, where he worked on Physical Layer circuits in CMOS, NMOS and Si-BiPolar technologies. He designed the industry’s first fully integrated CMOS Laser Driver with temperature compensation for optical transmitters without thermo-electric cooling. He was involved from system level to transistor level design and designed the 32-bit micro-controller based system for – Micro-programmable Accelerator for Rapid Simulations – MARS. In 1997, he founded AANETCOM, the first company to demonstrate and commercialize multiple channel CMOS Serdes. AANETCOM was acquired by PMC-Sierra in 2000 and continues to contribute to its product portfolio.

Kaushik Patel, Ph.D., Vice-President, IC Engineering

Kaushik has over 25 years of IC development experience working on high volume disk drive mixed signal ASICs to sophisticated network processors. He has managed multiple custom ASICs from concept to production. At Lightwire, his primary focus is creating the enabling technology in devices that drive our product strategy. Kaushik was VP of Hardware Engineering at Emulex Corporation where he drove the development of FCoE ASIC solutions. He came to Emulex through the acquisition of Aarohi Communications where he led the hardware team that built the industry’s highest performance storage processor. Prior to that, Kaushik held various engineering positions at Azanda, Cirrus Logic and Plessey Semiconductor. Kaushik has a Ph.D. and BSc(Hons) in Electrical Engg from the University of London.

Paul Negus, Vice-President, Operations

Paul Negus joined Lightwire in September 2011. Paul’s career spans some 30 years. He started his tech career at Philips Electronics and later Unisys in the UK. He moved to Sun Microsytems where he held a variety of progressively more senior roles with an operations focus and within different business units. After leaving Sun, Paul has held executive level positions with a variety of startups helping them achieve their goals. He was the VP of Operations at Avenex Corporation and led the outsourcing strategy. Most recently, he came from Gemfire Corporation which is in the Optical Network Components business as well where he was VP, Global Operations. Paul is a graduate of the Royal Military Academy, Sandhurst, UK.