Ilya Fushman

Ilya Fushman is a partner at Kleiner Perkins and focuses on fintech, enterprise software and infrastructure investments. A former academic with both an operating and venture capital background, Fushman helps the next wave of startups and entrepreneurs build global businesses.

Ilya’s passion is to explore the frontiers of cutting-edge technology: from navigating quantum computing to digital media and to building the world’s most efficient solar cell. Growing up in four countries gave Ilya a global and multi-cultural perspective and taught him to be open minded and inquisitive. After spending the early part of his career in academia, Ilya had a chance to dabble in entrepreneurship and was immediately hooked on the excitement of building teams and bringing new technologies to realization. Ilya’s goal is to enable the same experience for creative teams with disruptive ideas.

After two years of investing and working with early stage companies as a Principal at Khosla Ventures, Ilya was drawn back to startup life. Ilya worked at Dropbox, where he focused on strategic partnerships, corporate development and platform integration. As one of Dropbox’s first 75 employees, he helped build and run the company’s business and corporate development functions, before taking on a product leadership role and building out Dropbox, Dropbox for Business and the developer platform.

Prior to Khosla Ventures, Ilya was the director of device design and data management at Solar Junction – a venture funded high-efficiency solar cell manufacturer, where he led the development efforts to create a world-record efficiency multi-junction solar cell and built web- based data management and productivity tools that accelerated the development. Alongside technology, Ilya developed business intelligence software and solar finance and market models.

Ilya holds a PhD in Applied Physics and M.S. in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University, where he focused on quantum computing and semiconductor physics, as well as a few internet ventures. At Caltech, Ilya worked on single-molecule biophysics, microfluidics, computational fluid dynamics and numerical simulation methods.