Aaref Hilaly

EXPERIENCE

Aaref Hilaly joined Bain Capital in 2020. He is a Partner on the Ventures team, focused on seed and Series A investments in AI-powered applications, machine learning, and cloud infrastructure.

Prior to joining Bain Capital, Aaref spent seven years as a partner at Sequoia where he worked closely with the leadership teams of several category-defining companies and served on the boards of Clari, Guardant Health (NASDAQ: GH), Lightstep, MobileIron (NASDAQ: MOBL), Skyhigh Networks (acquired by McAfee), StackRox, and ThousandEyes (acquired by Cisco). Before becoming an investor, Aaref spent 10 years building two companies as an entrepreneur. In 2000, he co-founded CenterRun, a pioneer in datacenter automation, and sold the company to Sun Microsystems three years later. He then became CEO of Clearwell, an early SaaS application, which automated e-discovery for legal teams. Aaref grew Clearwell from a handful of engineers into a profitable company with over $100 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2011, Symantec acquired Clearwell for $410 million, and Aaref became vice president of engineering in Symantec’s information management group.

EDUCATION

Aaref holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and read philosophy, politics and economics (PPE) at Oxford University.