Aaref Hilaly
Partner at Bain Capital Ventures
San Francisco, California
Overview
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.
Series B Investor + Board Member
2025
Krea is a leading AI platform for image generation and refinement. Its magic is in rapidly incorporating the latest models and making them available to creatives, without imposing an aesthetic -- instead, it amplifies the user's unique creative identity. Krea's 750K weekly active users create over 3M images a day.
Seed & Series B investor + Board Member
2023
Decagon is building an agentic platform for customer communication, starting with customer support. The company has grown rapidly, winning market-leading customers like Figma, Notion and Rippling. Its pace of execution is ferocious.
Decagon is a software development company that develops customer support software enabling businesses to improve their customer services.
Raised $100,000,000.00 from A* Capital, Bond, Bain Capital Ventures, ACME Capital, Accel and Elad Gil.
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.
Series B & D investor + Board Member
2023
EvenUp is using genAI to build an operating system for personal injury attorneys. The company's Claims Intelligence Platform creates demand letters, medical chronologies, and other core units of work.
EvenUp is a legal tech company developing cloud and AI-based legal case management solutions.
Raised $220,500,000.00 from Lightspeed Venture Partners, PremjiInvest, Bessemer Venture Partners, B Capital, Bain Capital Ventures and SignalFire.
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.