Battery Ventures expands Silicon Valley office with hires from Google, Verisign

Battery Ventures, a venture capital firm with offices in Menlo Park, Calif. and Waltham, Mass. has hired two people for its Menlo Park office, including a product manger from Google, Satya Patel (pictured here).

Patel will be a senior associate and will focus on the software, consumer Internet and digital media markets. You can see his bio here.

Battery also hired Matt Niehaus (bio here), director of strategic development at VeriSign. He will be a partner, and concentrate on investing in communication services and infrastructure technologies, the firm said.

They’ll help Battery to invest in companies at any stage of development, from seed through buyout. The hires bring the number of investment professionals in Battery’s Silicon Valley office to 12, the firm said.

Patel was most recently as senior product manager at Google, and helped to build the AdSense business through partner development. Before Google, Satya was a senior product manager at DoubleClick focused on search marketing. He also worked on various initiatives for the DART adserving platform. Earlier, Satya was a Senior Associate at Impact Venture Partners, an early stage firm in New York, where he focused on investments in the Internet software, services and media markets.

Before Verisign, Niehaus co-founded R4 Global Solutions, an RFID (radio frequency identification). It was acquired by Verisign. Previously, he was an investor at Telegraph Hill Communications Partners, a firm he co-founded, as well as at J.P. Morgan Capital.

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