Martin Casado

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Martin Casado

Martín Casado is an American software engineer, entrepreneur, and investor. He is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, was a pioneer of software-defined networking, and was a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Nicira Networks.

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• Martin Casado

  From the Editor ## Last Updated May 27, 2026, 6:30am EDT Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm's infrastructure practice. He joined the firm in 2016. At Andreessen Horowitz, Casado has made investments into AI startups like Thinking Machines, World Labs and Safe Superintelligence. He sits on the board of coding startup Cursor, for which SpaceX signed a $60 billion option to acquire in April 2026. Casado was born in Spain and studied at Northern Arizona University before completing a masters and doctorate degree in computer science at Stanford University. He started his career at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before founding software-defined networking startup Nicira which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. [...] Martin Casado recently took the reins as general manager of VMware’s networking business unit, a $100 million (revenue) business that layers a virtual network on top of VMware’s core virtualization software. At the center of Casado’s 600-person team is his old group from Nicira, a startup he cofounded out of Stanford and sold to VMware for nearly $1.3 billion in 2012. Casado leads VMware’s innovation into new security products that will live on those networks and keep them safe. “The most important thing is VMware gives us trust and autonomy,” Casado says. “You get access to 500,000 customers, 40 million machines and plenty of resources.” ByPeter HighContributor Aug 20, 2014 ### 1 Martin Casado, Cofounder of Nicira and General Manager of Networking, VMware [...] Martin Casado recently took the reins as general manager of VMware’s networking business unit, a $100 million (revenue) business that layers a virtual network on top of VMware’s core virtualization software. At the center of Casado’s 600-person team is his old group from Nicira, a startup he cofounded out of Stanford and sold to VMware for nearly $1.3 billion in 2012. Casado leads VMware’s innovation into new security products that will live on those networks and keep them safe. “The most important thing is VMware gives us trust and autonomy,” Casado says. “You get access to 500,000 customers, 40 million machines and plenty of resources.” ByDorothy PomerantzFormer Contributor Aug 21, 2014 ### Martin Casado, Cofounder of Nicira and General Manager of Networking, VMware

• Martin Casado - Wikipedia

  American software engineer and investor | Martín Casado | | Born | 1975 or 1976 (age 49–50) Cartagena, Spain | | Education | Northern Arizona University (Bachelor's) Stanford University (Masters, Ph.D.) | | Occupations | Andreessen Horowitz, General Partner | Martín Casado is an American software engineer, entrepreneur, and investor. He is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, was a pioneer of software-defined networking, and was a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Nicira Networks. ## Early life and education [edit] [...] ## Early life and education [edit] Martín Casado was born around 1976 in Cartagena, Spain. He received his bachelor's degree from Northern Arizona University in 2000. In 2017, he received an honorary doctorate from the same university. Casado was a researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory from 1998 until 2003. While at LLNL, he ran large-scale computer simulations for the United States Department of Defense. [...] Along with McKeown and Shenker, Casado promoted software-defined networking. His Ph.D. work at Stanford University led to the development of the OpenFlow protocol, which was promoting using the term software-defined networking (SDN). McKeown and Shenker co-founded the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) in 2011 to transfer control of OpenFlow to a not-for-profit organization. In July 2012, VMware acquired Nicira for $1.26 billion. At VMware he was made a fellow and held the positions chief technology officer (CTO) for networking and security and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit.

• Martin Casado | USENIX

  ## sponsors ## help promote USENIX ATC '16 USENIX ATC '16 Get Help Promote graphics! ## USENIX Conference Policies # Martin Casado Martin Casado is a general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware in 2012. While at VMware, Martin served as senior vice president and general manager of the Networking and Security Business Unit. [...] Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he created the software-defined networking (SDN) movement, leading to a new paradigm of network virtualization. While at Stanford he also cofounded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006. For his work, Martin was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University.

• Martin Casado, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz

  # Martin Casado ## Infra Investing Team ### About Martin Casado is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s infrastructure practice. He first joined the firm in 2016 and currently serves on the boards of Ambient.ai, Astranis, Braintrust, Coactive, Convex, Cursor, Distributional, Fivetran, Ideogram, Imply, Kong, Material Security, Netlify, Pindrop Security, Preset, Truffle Security, and World Labs. He previously served on the boards of dbt Labs (acquired by Fivetran), DeepMap.ai (acquired by NVIDIA), Isovalent (acquired by Cisco), Metronome (acquired by Stripe), Orbit (acquired by Postman), Parsec Gaming (acquired by Unity), Tabular (acquired by Databricks) and Yubico (IPO $YUBICO). [...] Martin was previously the cofounder and chief technology officer at Nicira, which was acquired by VMware for $1.26 billion in 2012. While at VMware, Martin was a fellow and served as a senior vice president and general manager of the networking and security business unit, which he scaled to a $600 million run-rate business by the time he left VMware in 2016. [...] Martin started his career at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before moving over to work with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity. These experiences inspired his work at Stanford where he helped pioneer the software-defined networking (SDN) movement. While at Stanford he also co-founded Illuminics Systems, an IP analytics company, which was acquired by Quova Inc. in 2006. For his work, Martin was awarded both the ACM Grace Murray Hopper award and the NEC C&C award, and he’s an inductee of the Lawrence Livermore Lab’s Entrepreneur’s Hall of Fame. He holds both a PhD and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford University. ### Latest Content by Martin Infra

• a16z GP, Martin Casado: Anthropic vs OpenAI & Why Open Source is a National Security Risk with China

  # a16z GP, Martin Casado: Anthropic vs OpenAI & Why Open Source is a National Security Risk with China ## 20VC with Harry Stebbings 217000 subscribers 277 likes ### Description 22077 views Posted: 28 Jul 2025 Martin Casado is a General Partner @ a16z where he leads the firms $1.25BN infrastructure fund. At a16z, Martin has led investments in companies like Cursor, dbt Labs, and Fivetran to name a few. Before joining a16z, he co-founded Nicira, acquired by VMware for $1.26B. At VMware, he served as CTO of Networking. Widely regarded as a visionary in enterprise infrastructure, Martin has helped shape the modern cloud computing stack. In Today’s Episode We Discuss: