Aaref Hilaly

Aaref joined Bain Capital Ventures in 2020. He focuses on seed and Series A investments in AI-powered applications, machine learning and cloud infrastructure. Previously, he spent seven years as a partner at Sequoia where he worked closely with the leadership teams of several category-defining companies and served on the boards of Clari, Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), Lightstep, MobileIron (NASDAQ: MOBL), Skyhigh Networks (acquired by McAffee), StackRox, and ThousandEyes (acquired by Cisco).

Before becoming an investor, Aaref spent 10 years building two companies as an entrepreneur. In 2000, he co-founded CenterRun, a pioneer in datacenter automation, and sold the company to Sun Microsystems three years later. He then became CEO of Clearwell, an early SaaS application, which automated e-discovery for legal teams. Aaref grew Clearwell from a handful of engineers into a profitable company with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2011, Symantec acquired Clearwell for $410 million, and Aaref became vice president of engineering in Symantec’s information management group.