Ursheet Parikh

Ursheet Parikh is a Partner at Mayfield, where he invests in AI, enterprise infrastructure, and human & planetary health. Mayfield says he partners with founders "deeply and early" in the company life cycle on products tied to generational technology and market trends.

Before becoming an investor, Parikh was an operator and founder. He co-founded StorSimple in 2009 and served as CEO; Microsoft acquired the cloud-integrated storage company in 2012. He later worked at Microsoft and previously held product and executive roles at Cisco and Andiamo Systems, a storage networking startup acquired by Cisco. He also worked at Deloitte Consulting.

Parikh joined Mayfield in 2013. His Mayfield profile lists current founder partnerships including Balbix, Chemix, Highway 9 Networks, Mammoth Biosciences, Mirvie, Obot, Qventus, Qwiet.AI, and Versa Networks. Mayfield says exits from his early founder partnerships have generated more than $1.5B in exit value, including Rancher Labs, CloudGenix, and Foodsmart.

He holds an MBA from the Wharton School and a Bachelor's in Computer Science & Engineering from IIT Mumbai, where he received the Young Alumni Achiever Award in 2015. He is also a founder of Plaksha University and a founding board member of The Digital Health Hub Foundation.

• Invests at inception, Seed, and Series A, with Mayfield's early fund focused on inception and early customer adoption.
• Mayfield AI Start targets AI founders at Day Zero, including pre-product teams, and says it likes to be the first institutional check for $1M-$4M.
• Focuses on AI, enterprise infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, human health, planetary health, and engineering biology.
• Looks for hard problems, hard-to-replicate solutions, customer empathy, product-market evidence, and founder learning agility; Parikh says, "a company cannot go faster than its founders."
• In engineering biology and health, favors built-to-last platform companies that can become sustainable businesses, not only asset-sale biotech companies.
• Values category leadership and storytelling: he argues founders should not be "a best-kept secret" when trying to attract talent, customers, partners, and investors.
• Prefers founders who can acknowledge gaps in a pitch rather than reflexively defend every weakness; he says investors are testing whether they can have productive board-level conversations with the founder.