Rajiv Laroia

Rajiv is the cofounder and CTO of The Light Company, a company dedicated to reimagining photography. From September 2012 to March 2013 he was an Entrepreneur in Residence at Charles River Ventures. From February 2011 to September 2012 he was SVP and CTO of Sonus Networks. Prior to that he was SVP of Technology at Qualcomm Inc. (Nasdaq: QCOM). In February 2000 he founded Flarion Technologies and was the CTO until it was acquired by Qualcomm for $805 million in January of 2006. Flarion was the first to develop OFDMA based all-IP mobile broadband technology which is now the basis of LTE. Before launching Flarion Rajiv had been with Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories since 1992 when he joined the prestigious Mathematical Sciences Research Center. In 1997, he became head of Bell Labs' Digital Communications Research Department in the Wireless Research Center.

Rajiv has a very broad background that spans wireless communication networks, data transmission, information theory, VLSI design and architecture, analog mixed-signal and RF circuit design, high-speed AD/DA data converters, speech image & video processing/compression and optics.

Rajiv received his Ph.D. and Master's degrees from the University of Maryland, College Park and a Bachelor's degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi, all in electrical engineering. His thesis also contributed to V.34, the ITU voice-band modem international standard. He has coauthored the book "OFDMA Mobile Broadband Communications: A Systems Approach" with Dr. Junyi Li and Dr. Xinzhou Wu. He has over 300 issued patents and more than 300 pending. Rajiv has won numerous industry awards. He was inducted to the Innovations Hall of Fame, University of Maryland, College Park, in 2006. In 2007 he received the IIT Delhi Distinguished Alumni Award and in 2013 the Distinguished Alumni Award from the EE Department, University of Maryland. He was awarded the IEEE Industrial Innovation Award in 2013. Rajiv is a Fellow of the IEEE.