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Aaref Hilaly

Partner at Bain Capital Ventures

San Francisco, California

Overview 

Aaref Hilaly is a Partner at Bain Capital Ventures, with a strong background in venture capital and entrepreneurship. Notable highlights include investing in successful companies like Momento and Clari, as well as holding leadership roles at Symantec and Clearwell Systems. Currently based in San Francisco, California, Aaref Hilaly's career achievements include serving as a Partner at Sequoia Capital and leading companies like Clearwell Systems as President & CEO.

Work Experience 

  • Partner

    2020 - Current

    BCV helps technical founders build businesses around their ideas. We invest early (seed / Series A), and commit -- working closely with founders on recruiting, early customers, messaging, launch and scale. Our team brings deep domain expertise in AI, cloud infrastructure, fin-tech, and more, and taps the unique network and portfolio of Bain Capital.

Bain Capital Ventures invests in seed to growth-stage startups that uses tech to disrupt existing markets or create entirely new ones.

  • Seed Investor + Board Member

    2023

    Contextual is a platform for bringing large language models (LLMs) into the enterprise, by addressing issues such as hallucination and attribution. The technology is inspired by the founders' seminal work on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at Facebook AI Research.

Contextual AI offers a pioneering approach to generative AI for the workplace.

Raised $100,000,000.00 from Snowflake Ventures, HSBC Ventures, Conviction Partners, Bezos Expeditions, NVentures, Greycroft, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Lip-Bu Tan, Bain Capital Ventures and Recall Capital.

  • Seed Investor + Board Member

    2022

    Cleanlab improves the quality of text, tabular and image data used to train large language models (LLMs). The company started with a widely-adopted open-source tool to diagnose data quality issues. It recently added a paid, closed-source offering (Cleanlab Studio) to programmatically address those issues.

Cleanlab automates data error detection and correction to help companies improve the quality of their datasets.

Raised $30,000,000.00 from TQ Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures and Menlo Ventures.

  • Seed Investor + Board Member

    2021

    Momento is an intelligent, serverless cache that any developer can build into her app within five minutes. It instantly scales to millions of TPS with enterprise-grade availability and security, without any configurations. The founders previously built AWS DynamoDB from inception to over a billion in revenue.

Momento focuses on helping developers build reliable applications via serverless distributed systems.

Raised $30,000,000.00 from Neha Narkhede, The General Partnership, Marianna Tessel, Bain Capital Ventures, John Lilly, Tom Killalea and Don MacAskill.

  • Seed Investor + Board Member

    2021

    Felt is a simple, delightful, browser-first mapping app that lets its users think in maps. With Felt, anyone can create a beautiful map in minutes through pre-built templates and easy-to-access data sets, and then share them publicly or privately.

  • Seed & Series A Investor + Board Member

    2012

    Clari's revenue operations platform has become the way many sales leaders run their business. It complements Salesforce to provide actionable forecasts, pipeline management and activity intelligence.

  • Partner

    2012 - 2019

    General Partner focused on Seed / Early. Over seven years, I invested in, and served on the boards of, a dozen companies. Two went public (Guardant Health, MobileIron), one is a unicorn (Clari), three were acquired for ~$1 billion each (Lightstep (ServiceNow), Skyhigh (McAfee), ThousandEyes (Cisco)), and a couple were total disasters. Privileged to learn venture investing from some of the best in the business.

Sequoia Capital is a VC firm that invests in startups in the energy, financial, enterprise, healthcare, internet, and mobile industries.

  • Vice President, Engineering

    2011 - 2012

    Joined Symantec through its acquisition of Clearwell and served for a year on the leadership team.

Email Filtering Company

Raised $35,000,000.00 from TCV, Crosslink Capital, NortonLifeLock, Critical Path, Accel, Opportunity Capital Partners, Esther Dyson, Bill Joy and Thomas Weisel Partners.

  • President & CEO

    2005 - 2011

    Led company from the early stages of product development to over $100m in ARR within 6 years, growing 80% YoY. Raised a total of $33m from Sequoia (seed & Series A) and Redpoint (Series B). Burned a cumulative $25m to reach profitability. Clearwell was the leading e-discovery software (legal-tech) company for enterprises and government agencies. Symantec acquired Clearwell in 2011 for $410 million.

Clearwell Systems offers an e-discovery platform and app that enables companies to manage their legal, regulatory and investigative matters.

Raised $29,000,000.00 from Redpoint, Sequoia Capital and DAG Ventures.

  • Founder & CEO

    2000 - 2003

    My first startup! CenterRun pioneered data center automation. We raised Series A from Sequoia, grew to 30 people and $5 million in revenue, and then sold the company (too early) to Sun Microsystems for $66 million.

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