Here are six recent hires we noticed in the technology and startup space.
• Austin emergency medical services software company ESO Solutions Inc. said Nov. 5 it has hired Kerri Swope as chief customer officer. She was previously head of customer operations at Gusto, a San Francisco-based payroll software company that recently acquired Austin's RemoteTeam.com. Prior to that, Swope worked at Care.com as vice president of Care.com HomePay. ESO, founded in 2004, is led by President and CEO Chris Dillie. Back in March, the company secured a majority stake investment from Austin-based PE firm Vista Equity Partners.
• San Francisco- and Austin-based growth equity firm Mainsail Partners promoted Jason Frankel, who is based in Austin, to partner. He joined the firm in 2014 as an associate. It also promoted David Farsai, who appears to be based in California, to partner, and it added Erin Sedloff as associate general counsel. Mainsail has raised about $1.3B in capital and made investments in 50 companies since its founding in 2003.
• Austin-based cold brew coffee startup Brewbike said Nov. 2 it has appointed Sierra Bloodgood as its CEO. Bloodgood was previously Brewbike's CMO. Prior to that she was VP of marketing at Austin marketing agency Guinn Partners. The startup, which slings cold brew on college campuses and sells coffee beans direct to consumer, was founded in Illinois by Lucas Philips in 2015. It moved to Austin in 2019, and it now has a presence in 11 U.S. markets, including at the University of Texas at Austin and Texas State University. It has raised $2.9 million in funding, according to Crunchbase.
• Austin marketing and custom experience company Bazaarvoice Inc. has named Zarina Lam Stanford as its new CMO. She was previously chief communication and marketing officer at San Antonio-based Rackspace Technology.
• Cedar Park-based Firefly Aerospace Inc. named Jason B. Mello as team president of its subsidiary Firefly Space Transport Services division in Washington, D.C. Mello is a former Air Force colonel who was most recently at the Air Force Office of Scientific Research as the chief research and tech officer. The addition comes as the company just completed a critical design review of its lunar lander, called Blue Ghost, and it comes a couple months after Firefly's first launch, which ended in an explosion.
• Local AI- and computer vision-based inventory management startup Pensa Systems Inc. added Tim Whiting as its VP of marketing. Whiting was most recently head of marketing at Label Insight, which was acquired by NielsenIQ. He’s also worked at OpinionLab and Motorola.
