Aaref Hilaly

CEO

San Francisco, California, United States23 yrs 3 mos experience
Highly Stable

Key Highlights

  • Transformed from rookie founder to confident CEO.
  • Led Clearwell to over $100m in ARR.
  • Invested in multiple successful startups.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Venture Capitalist with deep expertise in SaaS and AI-driven startups.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Venture CapitalEntrepreneurship

Other Skills

TechnologyLeadershipStart-upsSaaSEnterprise SoftwareC++EconomicsPartner ManagementThought LeadershipPrivate EquityWeb DevelopmentMobile ApplicationsBusiness DevelopmentManagementLitigation Support

About

I love working with talented, hungry people who have big ideas. It’s why I moved halfway across the world to Silicon Valley, and then started a company (CenterRun). When that was acquired, I tried again (Clearwell) – except better, because this time I had some relevant experience and was more able to cope with the terror and euphoria involved in leading a start-up. Looking back, at both companies I was lucky to have venture investors who helped me recover from my rookie mistakes, and who enabled me to grow from an inexperienced founder into a confident CEO. I became an investor with the goal of now helping other founders do the same.

Experience

Cognition

Series C Investor

Jan 2025Present · 1 yr 2 mos

  • Cognition is building the primary interface for human-computer interaction. Its starting point is a market leading IDE (Windsurf) and background coding agent (Devin). The company has grown rapidly to nine-figures in ARR within two years of its founding, with customers such as Citi, Goldman Sachs, Nubank and Ramp.

Krea.ai

Series B Investor + Board Member

Jan 2025Present · 1 yr 2 mos

  • Krea is a leading AI platform for image generation and refinement. Its magic is in rapidly incorporating the latest models and making them available to creatives, without imposing an aesthetic -- instead, it amplifies the user's unique creative identity. Krea's 750K weekly active users create over 3M images a day.

Charta health

Seed & Series A Investor + Board Member

Jan 2024Present · 2 yrs 2 mos

  • Charta is an AI-powered medical chart review platform for physical practices. Instead of reviewing 1-3% of charts post-billing, with Charta practice groups review 100% pre-billing at a fraction of the cost. This lifts practice revenue 10-15% on day one and improves clinical outcomes.

Decagon

Seed & Series B investor + Board Member

Jan 2023Present · 3 yrs 2 mos

  • Decagon is building an agentic platform for customer communication, starting with customer support. The company has grown rapidly, winning market-leading customers like Figma, Notion and Rippling. Its pace of execution is ferocious.

Evenup

Series B & D investor + Board Member

Jan 2023Present · 3 yrs 2 mos

  • EvenUp is using genAI to build an operating system for personal injury attorneys. The company's Claims Intelligence Platform creates demand letters, medical chronologies, and other core units of work.

Contextual ai

Seed Investor + Board Member

Jan 2023Present · 3 yrs 2 mos

  • Contextual is a platform for bringing large language models (LLMs) into the enterprise, by addressing issues such as hallucination and attribution. The technology is inspired by the founders' seminal work on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at Facebook AI Research.

Bain capital ventures

Partner

Jan 2020Present · 6 yrs 2 mos

  • BCV helps technical founders build businesses around their ideas. We invest early (seed / Series A), and commit -- working closely with founders on recruiting, early customers, messaging, launch and scale. Our team brings deep domain expertise in AI, cloud infrastructure, fin-tech, and more, and taps the unique network and portfolio of Bain Capital.
Venture CapitalTechnologyEntrepreneurshipLeadership

Sequoia capital

Partner

Jan 2012Jan 2019 · 7 yrs

  • General Partner focused on Seed / Early. Over seven years, I invested in, and served on the boards of, a dozen companies. Two went public (Guardant Health, MobileIron), one is a unicorn (Clari), three were acquired for ~$1 billion each (Lightstep (ServiceNow), Skyhigh (McAfee), ThousandEyes (Cisco)), and a couple were total disasters. Privileged to learn venture investing from some of the best in the business.

Symantec

Vice President, Engineering

Jan 2011Jan 2012 · 1 yr

  • Joined Symantec through its acquisition of Clearwell and served for a year on the leadership team.

Clearwell systems

President & CEO

Jan 2005Jan 2011 · 6 yrs

  • Led company from the early stages of product development to over $100m in ARR within 6 years, growing 80% YoY. Raised a total of $33m from Sequoia (seed & Series A) and Redpoint (Series B). Burned a cumulative $25m to reach profitability. Clearwell was the leading e-discovery software (legal-tech) company for enterprises and government agencies. Symantec acquired Clearwell in 2011 for $410 million.

Centerrun

Founder & CEO

Jan 2000Jan 2003 · 3 yrs

  • My first startup! CenterRun pioneered data center automation. We raised Series A from Sequoia, grew to 30 people and $5 million in revenue, and then sold the company (too early) to Sun Microsystems for $66 million.

Education

Harvard Business School

MBA

McGill University

MA — Economics

University of Oxford

BA

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