Brian Stevens

Brian Stevens is based in Boston, Massachusetts. He is Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer for AI at Red Hat. He holds a master's degree in computer systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a bachelor's degree in computer science from the University of New Hampshire.

He first worked at Red Hat from 2001 to 2014. His last role in that stint was executive vice president of worldwide engineering and CTO. Red Hat describes him as central to the company's early growth and its expansion into cloud, middleware and virtualization. He then served as VP and CTO of Google Cloud from 2014 to 2019.

Stevens later became CEO of Neural Magic, a Massachusetts startup that builds software to speed up AI model inference. Red Hat completed its acquisition of Neural Magic in January 2025, and he returned to Red Hat in his current role. Neural Magic was founded in 2018 by Alex Matveev and MIT professor Nir Shavit, so Stevens was a CEO there and not a founder. Crunchbase lists 0 companies founded.

He has also held board seats. He joined the Nutanix board in June 2019 and served until June 2025. At Nutanix he chaired the Security and Privacy Committee and sat on the Compensation Committee. He joined the Genpact board in May 2020. MarketScreener lists earlier directorships at Pentaho, DataGravity, the American National Red Cross and IEEE.

Crunchbase lists 3 investments and 3 portfolio companies for Stevens, with 0 lead investments and 0 exits. PitchBook classifies him as an active individual angel investor. It lists 2 of the investments, Dagger and MinIO, and gives no deal sizes.

The earliest investment on record is in Rocana. A 2017 Global Venturing report on Splunk picking up Rocana's assets says Rocana raised $4.4M in 2014 from GV, General Catalyst and angel investor Brian Stevens. Crunchbase lists Rocana as a Series A. Crunchbase lists his MinIO investment as a seed round, and PitchBook dates it to June 2015. His most recent recorded investment is the Dagger Series A on March 30, 2022. Tracxn reports that round as $20M, with Redpoint Ventures and Y Combinator among the co-investors.

His check sizes and ownership stakes in these companies are not public.

No public source lists Stevens as an angel investor in an AI company. His AI work is operational. He ran Neural Magic through its sale to Red Hat in 2025. As Red Hat's AI CTO he works on open source AI inference. On X he has posted about the llm-d project, a Kubernetes-native distributed inference framework built on vLLM, which Red Hat announced in May 2025.

Founders building in AI inference, model optimization or open source AI infrastructure may find his operating experience relevant. That is an inference from his role. He has not said he invests in these areas.

Stevens has not published a thesis, preferred stage or check size. The recorded deals are one 2014 Series A (Rocana), one seed (MinIO) and one Series A (Dagger), all with institutional co-investors. The companies sit in infrastructure and developer software. Tracxn tags Dagger as Enterprise Infrastructure and Enterprise Applications, and PitchBook classifies MinIO under systems and information management. All three are US-based investments per Tracxn and Crunchbase.

His LinkedIn profile says he has a passion for building and advising high-impact companies and driving disruptions that transform the industry. PitchBook marks him as actively seeking new investments. Neither source gives criteria or a check size.

• Dagger: software development company that raised a Series A on March 30, 2022. Stevens participated.
• MinIO: systems and information management software company. Crunchbase lists his investment as a seed round, and PitchBook dates it to June 2015.
• Rocana: data and IT operations analytics company that raised a round in 2014 with GV and General Catalyst. Splunk acquired its assets in 2017. Stevens invested as an angel.

• crunchbase.com/person/brian-stevens
• redhat.com/en/authors/brian-stevens
• genpact.com/about-us/board/brian-stevens
• pitchbook.com/profiles/investor/433971-73
• tracxn.com/d/people/brian-stevens/__mIdqXF1gsoTx8HSQjGhYHzbzB4a94dlyr4
• globalventuring.com/blog/2017/10/19/splunk-picks-up-rocana-assets
• hpcwire.com/aiwire/2025/01/13/red-hat-completes-acquisition-of-neural-
• marketscreener.com/insider/BRIAN-STEVENS-A0OJM8