Nagarjuna Venna

Nagarjuna Venna is a Senior Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he teaches Entrepreneurship and Venture Creation.

Nagarjuna is a technology entrepreneur, engineer, and open source contributor. He is a cofounder and chairman of Ashvin AI, a healthcare technology company. Previously, he cofounded BitSight, where he served as Chief Product Officer and a director from 2011 to 2020, and helped establish the cybersecurity ratings category. Before BitSight, he cofounded the risk management company Saperix, which FireMon acquired in 2011.

Nagarjuna is a named inventor on 20 issued U.S. patents covering network measurement, cybersecurity ratings, Internet asset attribution, and organizational cyber risk. He also coauthored research on measuring voice quality over the Internet and was an original contributor to RFC 6849, an IETF standard for testing real-time media connections.

Nagarjuna served on the board of Prochant, a healthcare revenue cycle management company, until its 2026 strategic transaction; by then, the company had grown to approximately 3,000 employees globally. He also serves on the advisory board of the Lexington Observer, a nonprofit community newsroom.

During the early transition of Telugu publishing to Unicode, Nagarjuna developed Padma, open-source software that converted text from legacy encodings into Unicode and helped make existing Telugu content accessible on modern systems. He also helped initiate Telugu Wikipedia in 2003 and coauthored proposals that led to the addition of 15 Telugu characters to the Unicode Standard. 

Nagarjuna holds a BTech in computer science and engineering from the National Institute of Technology Warangal and an MS in engineering and management from MIT.

In 2024, he received NIT Warangal’s Distinguished Alumni Award for Professional Excellence in Entrepreneurship.