Ilya Sukhar is an immigrant founder-engineer who built Parse into a category-defining backend-as-a-service platform before selling it to Facebook for ~$85M, giving him rare experience scaling both an independent developer tool startup and a global platform inside a major tech company. As a Matrix Partners investor, he combines this technical founding background with an unusual track record of early angel investments in companies like Scale AI, GitLab, and Airtable, while emphasizing rigorous referencing processes and supporting engineering-led CEOs building infrastructure and developer tools. Ilya Sukhar is an immigrant founder-engineer who built Parse into a category-defining backend-as-a-service platform before selling it to Facebook for ~$85M, giving him rare experience scaling both an independent developer tool startup and a global platform inside a major tech company. As a Matrix Partners investor, he combines this technical founding background with an unusual track record of early angel investments in companies like Scale AI, GitLab, and Airtable, while emphasizing rigorous referencing processes and supporting engineering-led CEOs building infrastructure and developer tools.