Anand Parikh was appointed Chief Executive Officer of AirHop in December 2023. Prior to the new role, he was AirHop’s VP of Strategic Partnerships and established a robust Open RAN partner ecosystem. Anand is an entrepreneurial leader with extensive experience in new business development and strategic partnerships. He has over 35 years of proven success in high-tech companies of various sizes, from early-stage start-ups to public companies. Anand brings extensive expertise in strategic planning, business development, cultivating partner ecosystems, and driving go-to-market strategies. He holds a BSEE from BITS Pilani (India), a MSCE from Boston University and an MBA from MIT Sloan School of Management.
Yan Hui is co-founder AirHop Communications and served as its CEO from the inception until December 2023. He now serves as Executive Chairman and CTO. His vision and insight into technological trends led him to recognize early that the future of the wireless industry would be shaped by software and network automation. AirHop has achieved several significant industry firsts under Yan’s leadership, including commercialization of real-time Self-Organized Network (SON) and deployment of AI/Machine Learning RAN optimization use cases in a real network. He led AirHop’s transformation from a three-person founding team to a dynamic and thriving operational software solution company. Yan has 20 years of wireless communications industry experience in technology and product development, corporate strategy and operations, product marketing and business development. Prior to AirHop, he established and managed 3G advanced R&D organization at Texas Instruments, developing innovative core system IPs for 3G wireless products. Yan also chaired the TI wireless patent committee and led the company’s wireless standardization activities. Yan held various management and engineering positions at Nortel Networks, Dot Wireless and served on the advisory board for ECE Department at University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has more than 30 patents granted or pending and a number of IEEE publications. He holds a Bachelor’s degree from Tianjin University, China and a MSEE degree from UW – Madison.
Joe Thome serves as Chief Operating Officer leading AirHop’s business operations, marketing and business development activities. He brings extensive experience across multiple disciplines as leader in building innovative technology companies. Joe has been instrumental in driving AirHop’s product strategy roadmap and business development pipeline. Prior to AirHop, he led business development and marketing of products including digital RF transceiver ICs for Orca Systems and a variety of cellular UE modem solutions for Texas Instruments, spanning CDMA2000, WiMAX, TD-SCDMA and UMTS. Joe was a co-founder of Dot Wireless, a CDMA2000 modem IC company, serving as CFO from inception through its acquisition by TI. He has also held various marketing and engineering roles for Protomatics, NextWave Telecom and Motorola. He holds a BSEE from the University of Iowa, a MSEE from National Technological University, and an MBA from the Anderson School at UCLA.
Bijan Golkar serves as the Vice President of Engineering, leading AirHop’s R&D organization in product development, product commercialization, and technical support during customer engagements. Drawing upon his academic research in wireless communications, with a specific focus on coordinated resource allocation and inter-cell interference management in heterogeneous Radio Access Networks (RAN). Dr. Golkar has played a pivotal role and has made significant contributions to AirHop’s technological advancements and product development. Over his decade-long tenure at AirHop, Dr. Golkar has held diverse engineering and management roles. He has overseen the design of system architectures, algorithms and AI/ML platforms for a broad portfolio of non- and near-real-time eSON solutions, as well as O-RAN compliant Auptim xApps and rApps. Additionally, Dr. Golkar has been an active participant and contributor in industry organizations including the Small Cell Forum, Telcom Infra Project (TIP), and the O-RAN Alliance. Dr. Golkar has published academic papers in numerous journals and conference proceedings, co-authored several industry technical papers and holds a number of granted and pending patents. He earned his Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto.