# Weka Appoints Shailesh Manjrekar as Head of AI and Strategic Alliances **Published:** January 23, 2020 **Location:** CAMPBELL, Calif. ![WEKA logo with abstract white shapes on a textured purple to orange gradient background](https://cdn.sanity.io/images/ult5g8gw/production/4061da3e03532447a685d4d60928329ecf6bfba7-1200x675.png) > Weka appoints Shailesh Manjrekar as Head of AI and Strategic Alliances to advance key partnerships and drive growth across AI, ML, genomics, finance and HPC. WekaIO™ (Weka), the innovation leader in high-performance, scalable file storage for data-intensive applications, today announced the appointment of Shailesh Manjrekar as Head of AI and Strategic Alliances. Manjrekar comes to WekaIO from SwiftStack, a leading provider of data storage and management solutions for data-driven customers. During his time at SwiftStack, he was Head of AI, responsible for Product, Solutions, and Corporate Development. Prior to SwiftStack, he had roles as Senior Director at Vexata, EMC, NetApp, Force10 Networks and previously held Senior Eng. positions at Hewlett Packard and Arohi Communications. Manjrekar is a seasoned IT professional who has extensive experience in building and managing emerging businesses across the USA, Asia, and EMEA. He brings an established background in providing effective product management, solutions marketing, and strategic alliances, along with a strong sense of business development vision and leadership to his new position. He has over two decades of technology expertise spanning AI and Deep Learning, Enterprise Business applications, Cloud Native applications, and Intent-Based Networking. In his new role, Shailesh will take ownership of WekaIO’s strategic technical alliances, aligning Weka’s product roadmap and validating the software on key platforms in our target markets and use cases, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML), genomics, finance, and high-performance computing (HPC). In addition, he will play a key role on the leadership team in strategic and corporate planning. “We are delighted to welcome Shailesh to the WekaIO team. We have always believed that the strength of our business relies heavily on the strength of our partnerships and alliances, making us stronger together,” said Barbara Murphy, vice president of marketing at WekaIO. “His experience in forming relationships, establishing operational efficiencies, and managing emerging businesses will be an invaluable asset in this alliances role. We welcome him to the leadership team and look forward to his playing an important role in the future growth and development of the company.” Manjrekar holds an MBA from San Jose State, College of Business, Certification in Mastering Project Management from Haas School of Business, UC Berkley, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Mumbai. Learn more about the WekaIO leadership team at [https://www.weka.io/company/leadership/](/company/leadership/) ## About WEKA **About WEKA** WEKA is the AI data and memory infrastructure company transforming the economics of agentic AI. Its NeuralMesh™ platform unifies high-performance data storage with extended GPU memory, giving enterprises, AI cloud providers, and AI builders a single foundation for training, inference, and agentic workloads. With Augmented Memory Grid, NeuralMesh extends GPU memory capacity by 1000x, accelerates time to first token by up to 20x, and delivers 10x more concurrent users from the same GPU footprint, proven in production benchmarks. Trusted by 30% of the Fortune 50, WEKA enables organizations to scale AI faster, optimize GPU utilization, and reduce the cost of every token served. Learn more at [www.weka.io](https://www.weka.io/) or connect with us on [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/weka-io/) and [X](https://x.com/weka). _WEKA and the W logo are registered trademarks of WekaIO, Inc. Other trade names herein may be trademarks of their respective owners._ **Media Contact:** WEKA Communications [pr@weka.io](mailto:pr@weka.io) ## More Press Releases - [Backblaze and WEKA Simplify Data Management Across the AI Lifecycle](/news/backblaze-and-weka-simplify-data-management-across-the-ai-lifecycle) - [WEKA and Andromeda Partner to Power AI Workloads at Global Scale](/news/weka-and-andromeda-partner-to-power-ai-workloads-at-global-scale) - [WEKA Unveils WEKApod 3: The World's Densest AI Storage and Memory System for Agentic Workloads](/news/wekapod-3-densest-ai-storage-memory-system) - [WEKA Debuts NeuralMesh 6 to Power Enterprise and Agentic AI Workloads at Production Scale](/news/neuralmesh-6-enterprise-agentic-ai)