The Redpoint Team

Nety Krishna is a Specialist Partner and the CTO at Redpoint Ventures.

At Redpoint, Nety is focused on identifying disruptive ideas and teaming up with passionate entrepreneurs to create novel solutions in the broad energy and materials sectors. Current areas of interest include applications that benefit from disruptive materials, new chemistries, novel systems and processes. Specifically, the following focus areas are of special interest: solid state lighting, novel fuel and chemical synthesis processes, high performance and scalable storage solutions, new material sets for renewable energy generation, medium and long term pollutant mitigation and minimization technologies, solutions to improve existing infrastructure to leverage energy efficiency, water technologies among others.

Nety brings a wealth of knowledge and experience in taking very nascent and raw ideas and working through the process of scaling them up for mass production. Very early stage and seed level ideas from university and research institutions are of special interest.

At Redpoint, Nety has led investments in two early stage companies. The first is developing novel solutions to reduce the overall cost of solid state lighting devices. The second company is working on novel pathways for incorporating waste elements into chemical and fuel synthesis.

Nety comes to Redpoint after spending more than 13 years at Applied Materials where he led activities in many areas of semiconductor processes, technology, device integration and roadmap development. In his role there, he helped to roll out many state-of-the-art technologies and systems that became standard processes for the global semiconductor manufacturing industry. Nety served as a core member of SRC and ITRS Working Groups related to emerging materials and devices for many years. In his last role at Applied, he led activities in the Advanced Technology Group in the Office of the CTO and developed the charter and instituted the strategy for expanding into new segments by developing new technologies and business models. The group's research activities covered new materials and systems for Advanced PV, Energy Efficiency, Lithium Ion Batteries, New Plasma Sources, Novel Flash Memories, Solid State Lighting and NanoMaterials.

Nety also worked closely with Applied Ventures, the internal strategic investment arm of Applied Materials. He was intimately involved with investments in fuel cells (Clear Edge Power), energy efficiency (Sage Electrochromics), batteries (ActaCell, Infinite Power Solutions), solid state lighting (Group IV Semiconductors, Illumitex), solid state memory (Adesto Technologies) and Displays/PV (Semprius).

Before joining Applied Materials, Nety worked on high energy physics experiments at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center & Univ. of Colorado, Boulder. The group was focused on understanding the early stages of the formation of the universe. He played a central role in many aspects of the experiment and devoted countless, happy hours in the collider hall.

Nety currently serves as an advisor to the Dept. of Mat.Sci and Engg at Stanford University and mentor for the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, UC Berkeley.

Nety received his M.Sc. in Physics from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and a M.A. and Ph.D. in Particle Physics from Rice University.