Babak Jafarian
Vice President and 5G Systems Lead
Lonergan Partners is pleased to announce that Babak Jafarian has been named Vice President and 5G Systems Lead at Aira Technologies. The search was led by Mark Lonergan.
About Babak
Dr. Jafarian joins Aira from Mavenir, where he served as Senior Director for 5G Open RAN product management. At Mavenir, Babak led 5G product design and delivery to various tier 1 MNOs, including the very first cloud-native 5G network in the world. Prior to Mavenir, he served in senior 5G product and 5G solution architect roles at Parallel Wireless, Ericsson, and Casa Systems. Babak has been a member of and contributor to multiple working groups in the O-RAN Alliance, including WG6, the ‘Cloudification and Orchestration’ workgroup. This workgroup specifies the disaggregation of RAN software from the underlying RAN hardware. The aim is to develop technology and reference designs that allow all components of the RAN to be built on commodity-off-the-self (COTS) servers.
Dr. Jafarian holds M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in mobile telecommunications from King’s College, London.
“With over 20 years’ experience across the global wireless telecommunications industry, Babak has had a front row seat in shaping wireless communications as we know it today,” said Anand Chandrasekher, CEO of Aira Technologies. “His career has spanned the profound architectural shift from traditional closed and proprietary network elements to the open, flexible, ORAN architecture of today. Babak’s background complements Aira’s thrust to apply ML to wireless for better performance, superior operational efficiency and improved total cost of ownership (TCO) for mobile network operators (MNOs).”
About Aira Technologies
Aira Technologies, an AI software technology startup, was founded in 2019 by wireless industry veterans including CEO Anand Chandrasekher (ex-Intel, ex-Qualcomm) and CTO Dr. Ravikiran Gopalan (ex-Bell Labs, ex-Qualcomm) along with well-known wireless researchers Dr. Pramod Viswanath (Professor, Princeton University) and Dr. Sreeram Kannan (Professor, University of Washington, Seattle). Aira’s vision is to harness machine learning to make every wireless connection more than 10x better. To that end, the company has assembled a team with a rare combination of 5G wireless technology and cutting-edge AI expertise. It is one of the very few companies that can harness the power of Machine Learning to improve wireless communications using real-time data from mobile networks.
Aira has distinguished itself as a technology innovator by using novel ML models to process the rich contextual data available on mobile networks today. Aira's models significantly improve predictions about the communications context of the 5G wireless user compared with traditional methods, and this translates to a more stable end user experience even in high variability environments. I am extremely excited to be joining an organization that is developing intelligent and automated ML-based technologies to address the network performance challenge posed by the data intensive wireless applications of today.
Babak Jafarian, Vice President and 5G Systems Lead, Aira Technologies
5G and Open RAN will re-invent the Mobile Industry as we know it. Aira is a globally-recognized leader in Open RAN and Babak will add greatly to their product offerings in this emerging area.
Mark Lonergan, Founder & Managing Partner, Lonergan Partners