Rachel Chalmers

Rachel has been an investor, advisor and technology industry analyst for over 20 years. As a principal at Ignition Partners, she identified innovative deals in enterprise security and infrastructure, machine learning and artificial intelligence. She was a board observer and advisor to Acalvio, Accompany, Aviatrix Systems, Docker, Streamsets, StrongLoop (acquired by IBM), Trifacta, Unikernel (acquired by Docker) and Wit.ai (acquired by Facebook, where it became Facebook AI Research.) Prior to Ignition, Rachel was employee number ten at 451 Research, where as VP Infrastructure she built a highly profitable practice and was among the first industry analysts to cover Cloudera, Splunk and VMware. She was also a founding board member of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit supporting the involvement of women in open technology and culture. Rachel is a frequent speaker and author on technology and infrastructure, and has been published in New Scientist and Salon. She serves on the advisory boards of Compaas and Honeycomb.io, and has an MPhil from Trinity College, Dublin, and a BA from the University of Sydney.