2026 Lunch & Learn – Silicon Valley

Avni Agrawal

Co-founder and CTO

SixSense

Avni Agrawal is the Co-founder and CTO of SixSense, a deep-tech AI company she has led for seven years. With a background in computer science and engineering, she is a passionate coder and began her career at Visa, building large-scale data systems. Avni founded SixSense to harness AI and transform high-tech manufacturing. She has defined the company’s technology strategy, creating AI solutions that enhance yield and productivity in semiconductor manufacturing and earning adoption from leading fabs and OSATs across Malaysia, Taiwan, Singapore, Israel, and the US.

She leads a cross-geography engineering and product team, wearing multiple hats across product, engineering, team building, fundraising, and customer success. Avni believes the speed of technology adoption is one of the biggest levers in high-tech industries and is driven by building solutions that were once only imagined. She has been recognized among Singapore’s 100 Women in Tech and Forbes 30 Under 30, reflecting her contributions to applied AI and industrial innovation.

Lyndsi Parker

Senior Director of Custom Silicon

Marvell

Lyndsi Parker, Senior Director for Custom Silicon at Marvell, is a trusted technical leader with nearly 20 years of experience in the semiconductor industry. With a proven ability to lead large, geographically dispersed teams, she has successfully delivered innovative silicon solutions across carrier, enterprise, and data center markets. Known for her passion for people development, Lyndsi fosters a culture of continuous learning, collaboration, and team growth. In 2024, Lyndsi was honored with the GSA WLI Rising Women in Semi Award, recognizing her exceptional contributions to the semiconductor industry. 

Lyndsi earned both Bachelor and Master of Science degrees in electrical engineering from The University of Texas at Austin. She launched her career at IBM with a technical focus on functional verification of custom ASIC designs, for which she holds two US patents. Expanding her role from technical expert to technical executive leader, she successfully guided her team through two pivotal acquisitions: the first by GlobalFoundries in 2015, which created the Avera subsidiary that was later acquired by Marvell in 2019. 

Beyond her technical accomplishments, Lyndsi is a champion for the advancement of women in technology. As a founding member and regional chairperson of the Women@Marvell inclusion network, she has helped enhance the careers of over 300 women across the Americas. Her influence extends beyond Marvell through her active participation in the Global Semiconductor Alliance’s Women’s Leadership Initiative (WLI), where she represents Marvell as a content expert and speaker at industry events. In 2024, Lyndsi was selected as a mentee for the prestigious Women in Hardware Mentorship Program and has been serving as a mentor since 2025. 

Eleena Ong

CVP Software Solutions and Applications Engineering

Lattice Semiconductor

Eleena Ong is the CVP Software Solutions and Applications Engineering at Lattice Semiconductor. Eleena joined Lattice with more than 25 years if heritage in the semiconductor industry leading both engineering and marketing organizations, most of that in the FPGA space. Prior to Lattice, Eleena was Vice President of Marketing at Fungible, a startup developing processors for the datacenter market. She also spent many years at Intel / Altera leading the product planning of high and mid-range FPGA portfolio, and planning and deploying board solutions into datacenters and communications applications. Eleena holds a Master of Science degree in Solid State Physics and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Telecommunications, minoring in Economics. 

Sharada Yeluri

AVP of Engineering

Astera Labs

Vasavi Pottumuttu

Senior Director of Silicon Engineering

Astera Labs

Vasavi Pottumuttu, Senior Director of Silicon Engineering at Astera, is a seasoned semiconductor verification leader with over 20 years of experience driving Design Verification for complex, high-performance SoCs and systems. She has spent more than a decade in technical and people leadership roles, delivering high-quality silicon on aggressive schedules.

At Astera, Vasavi contributes to the development of next-generation chips as part of the Silicon Engineering team. Her career includes roles at Apple, Nuova Systems, Texas Instruments, and Robert Bosch, giving her broad experience across consumer, networking, and enterprise silicon. She brings deep expertise in advanced verification methodologies and large-scale system verification, and works closely with architecture, design, and software teams to build robust, reusable verification environments. Beyond her technical work, Vasavi is passionate about mentoring engineers, fostering collaborative team cultures, and developing strong verification talent. She is particularly interested in emerging accelerator architectures and interconnects, and in evolving verification practices for modern compute systems.

Outside of work, Vasavi enjoys reading—especially biographies and historical fiction. She also finds joy in cooking and experimenting with flavors from different cuisines and enjoys hiking.

Sayeh Sharify

Principal Machine Learning Research Scientist

d-Matrix

Sayeh Sharify is a Principal Machine Learning Research Scientist at d-Matrix, where she leads research and development at the intersection of hardware and machine learning. Her work focuses on hardware-software co-design and the development of efficient ML algorithms optimized for next-generation AI accelerators. Sayeh brings extensive experience in high-performance ML systems, with a career spanning R&D roles at Cerebras Systems, Qualcomm, and Intel, where she contributed to pioneering efforts in AI architecture, model optimization, and system design. She holds a Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, where her research explored novel approaches to accelerate machine learning workloads, laying the groundwork for scalable and energy-efficient AI systems.