Naeem Zafar

Naeem Zafar is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur, educator, and author with a career spanning innovation in technology and agriculture. Zafar has led five companies as CEO, raised over $100 million in venture capital, and participated in dozens of startups as an investor, board member, and advisor. After graduating from Brown University with a degree in electrical engineering, Zafar began his career designing chips and electronic systems at Honeywell before launching his first startup.

Zafar later joined Quickturn Design Systems in Silicon Valley, where he contributed to the development of the first emulation system for chip design verification. The company went public and was subsequently acquired by Cadence. He went on to serve as CEO of Veridicom, a company specializing in silicon fingerprint sensors that was acquired by Apple. Following two additional CEO roles at electronic design automation companies, Zafar co-founded Bitzer Mobile, an enterprise security company acquired by Oracle.

Building on his experience in enterprise technology, Zafar founded TeleSense to apply IoT and AI technologies to agriculture, focusing on democratizing data for post-harvest grain management. TeleSense developed wireless sensors for monitoring temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide to reduce spoilage in the post-harvest grain industry. The company provided real-time wireless sensing and predictive analytics solutions for stored grain and was acquired by UPL, a food sustainability company with revenue exceeding $6 billion.

In addition to his entrepreneurial work, Zafar has established a career in academia. He has taught entrepreneurship at the University of California, Berkeley, at both Berkeley-Haas and the College of Engineering, as well as in the department of Sociology. Zafar is a Dean's Teaching Fellow, lecturer, and Industry Fellow at the Center of Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley, a Professor of the Practice at Brown University, and a lecturer at Santa Clara University. He teaches courses in entrepreneurship, technology strategy, innovation, and new venture finance. Zafar is also an amateur historian and lectures at the Institute for the Study of Western Civilization.

Zafar founded Startup-Advisor, a company dedicated to educating and advising entrepreneurs on business formation and management. He has authored five books on entrepreneurship, including "7-Steps to a Successful Startup," "Get Funded," "The Entrepreneur's Legal Guide to Starting Up!," "Market Research on a Shoestring!," and "Finance Essentials for Entrepreneurs." Through his writing and teaching, Zafar shares insights on startup strategy, venture capital, and business innovation. He is also an angel investor, providing seed capital to several Silicon Valley startups.