PowerShift Inno 2024: Get to know these new local tech leaders

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The C-suite executives highlighted in this Maryland Inno edition of PowerShift showcase the many reasons companies have added new talent in the past two years. From executives like Karlo Young, who is transitioning from a massive public company to a Federal Hill startup, to Gillian Henker, who is getting used to the responsibilities that come with being the public face of a company, these executives show the adaptability necessary to thrive in an ever-changing business environment.

Check out the rest of the PowerShift section here.

Arti Santhanam

Title: Executive director, Emerging Technology Centers

Since: Feb. 1

A former Maryland Technology Development Corp. executive is in charge of bringing one of Baltimore’s most important entrepreneurship programs back from the dead as the new executive director of the Emerging Technology Centers.

Arti Santhanam took over the entrepreneurship hub on Feb. 1 with a blank slate to remake the organization so it can survive as the demand for office space plummets across the region. The Baltimore Development Corp. shut down the ETC in 2023, ending one of the region’s largest incubators. Santhanam is now shifting the Emerging Technology Centers' focus from early stage startups to helping later-stage companies in Baltimore attract funding.

Santhanam plans to accomplish this by creating a venture studio. Venture studios have a more narrow focus than incubators or accelerators, usually working with only a few companies at a time. She plans to focus on the biotech and artificial intelligence industries to take full advantage of the federal tech hub designation that could give Baltimore the change to earn over $50 million in federal money.

“These are all good technologies with strong [intellectual property], but it's not really going anywhere,” Santhanam has said. “We felt like there was a need for another level of support that can be brought to these companies to help scale them up.”

Susan Tousi

Title: CEO, Delfi Diagnostics

Since: 2024

One of Baltimore’s greatest startup success stories now has a new leader who plans to push the diagnostics company to a wider commercial launch.

Susan Tousi, who took over as CEO from founder Victor Velculescu earlier this year, is spearheading Delfi Diagnostics' efforts to bring an early cancer detection test to a wide range of hospitals and health systems. Tousi has a lot of experience in bringing medical devices to the public through her role as chief commercial officer of Illumina Inc., a multinational pharmaceutical company with over 10,000 employees.

Delfi has already begun distributing its blood test, FirstLook Lung, to some health care systems. The device works by identifying dead cancer cells in the blood and then determining where in the body they came from to identify the type of cancer a patient has. The company raised $225 million of venture capital in 2022 to fund a 15,000-person trial for its lung cancer test. That followed a $100 million raise in a Series A round in 2021.

Veculescu chose Tousi because of their complementary skill sets. Tousi knows how to bring a product to market, while Veculescu is an expert in the science side of the business. Tousi is also familiar with Baltimore. She grew up in the Baltimore area and graduated from Loch Raven High School in Towson.

Tousi believes Delfi’s product could offer a lower-cost alternative to common cancer diagnosis methods to make early detection more accessible.

Sherrod Davis and Smitha Gopal

Titles: CEO and COO, EcoMap Technologies

Since: October 2023 and January 2024

A company announcing a new CEO is usually a celebratory occasion, but for EcoMap Technologies, the appointment of new C-suite executives is born from the tragic killing of its co-founder, Pava LaPere.

New CEO Sherrod Davis and COO Smitha Gopal are trying to keep LaPere's legacy alive by moving ahead with new products while giving staff space to grieve the loss. The firm uses technology to find and track all the relevant players in an industry to create an interactive map of an ecosystem like the technology or healthcare sector.

“She’s constantly on our minds," Davis said in an interview last year. “She built the company, so her fingerprints are everywhere.”

Davis co-founded EcoMap and served as COO before taking the top executive role in October after LaPere’s death. Prior to joining EcoMap, Gopal was CEO of Baltimore-based medical software company Rendia, which sold to PatientPoint in October of 2022.

EcoMap has been moving forward with two products LaPere worked on before her death: an artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that makes it easier for people to comb through the massive amount of data EcoMap has on file and a new version of EcoMap's core software that will offer various improvements, such as a strong integration of AI, different types of users, and improved performance.

Karlo Young

Title: President, Concentric Educational Solutions

Since: 2024

Karlo Young is going from working at a public company that used to be worth over $4 billion to a startup trying to grow amidst a tough time for public education.

Young is one of several new C-suite executives founder David Heiber hired at Concentric Educational Solutions after raising a $5 million series A round in 2023. Heiber brought in Young as chief operational officer, before promoting him to president earlier this year, to manage the startup's rapid growth. Concentric is one of the more notable success stories in recent Baltimore memory, growing from 20 staff members in 2020 to 147 in 2023 as need for truancy services skyrocketed during the pandemic. Young plans to continue that growth by finding new revenue sources for the Federal Hill firm as school districts face a fiscal cliff when federal COVID-19 funding runs out.

The job requires a mental shift for Young. His previous work as a senior vice president of public company 2U had him oversee part of a massive ed-tech firm that at one point was worth over $4 billion. Concentric is also much more focused on in-person connections through employees based in individual schools than 2U, a firm that focuses on helping people graduate with online degrees. Outside of 2U, Young has a long history in finance, working at two of the Big Four accounting firms, Deloitte and KPMG. His wide experience in business led him to being named a Baltimore Business Journal 40 under 40 honoree in 2018.

The chance to solve a problem that impacts his hometown drew Young away from big public companies and high finance to the startup world. Young, a Baltimore native, saw the impact of chronic absenteeism growing up and hopes his work can help Concentric can help drive people towards a better life.

“It’s a company in my backyard attacking this problem,” Young said. "I realized I could bring all my gifts, skills, talents, and experiences to help the leadership team solve this.”

Matthew Derella

Title: CEO, Catalyte

Since: 2022

Catalyte CEO Matthew Derella wants to apply the lessons he learned running one of the world’s most well-known technology companies to help Catalyte become a stronger engine for social mobility.

Derella took over from Jacob Hsu in 2022 after serving as the chief customer officer at Twitter for nine years. The executive helped grow Twitter from a $50 million company to a $5 billion business by overseeing ad sales, content partnerships and customer services. He views Catalyte as a chance to focus on one of the key parts of Twitter’s success, looking beyond traditional resume-based talent pools to hire a diverse staff. The Baltimore company uses a personality test to determine if people have the personality and temperament for a technology job. Once a person showcases an aptitude for a tech job, the firm provides training and eventually helps set them up with a job.

“Rather than [personnel] being just part of my job, that is my job,” Derella said. “Instead of just working for Twitter, I get to work with dozens of the greatest companies in the world on their talent strategies.”

Catalyte is trying to create a pipeline for people to get into technology jobs during a tough time for the industry. Layoffs have plagued many of the largest tech companies in the country, making it difficult for people to find employment. Derella believes that the Catalyte model answers the challenge by providing specialized training that prepares someone to work for an employer. Most college graduates have a lot of theoretical knowledge, Derella argued, but are rarely ready to get to work on the first day without additional training.

“We focus on the customer and their actual work environment so people are day one ready,” Derella said.

Gillian Henker

Title: President, Sisu Global Health

Since: April 2022

Gillian Henker is getting used to being the public face of a company she co-founded as Sisu Global Health tries to push into a wider global market.

Henker became president in April 2022, replacing co-founder Carolyn Yarina. The journey to the top leadership role has taken her from the more narrow scope of a chief technical officer to becoming the public face of the brand. Henker has been forced to step out of her comfort zone to conduct media interviews and all the other things necessary to build awareness for Sisu’s flagship Hemafuse device.

“It's a challenge as someone who likes to focus on execution and getting things done as an engineer and later in that CTO role,” Henker said.

The Hemafuse device is a product that recycles a patient’s blood lost to internal bleeding to help doctors perform procedures in rural areas. Hemafuse is intended to make sure people survive while they wait to get transferred to a large medical center with a blood bank.

What keeps Henker going through the changes in her new role is the opportunity to talk to physicians from Kenya and other countries where Hemafuse has made an impact. After successful runs in parts of Africa and Ukraine, Henker wants to take the product to doctors in the United States. She is targeting the U.S. military and rural areas as customers.

“If you don't get trauma care within an hour, the chances of survival go down drastically,” Henker said. “The U.S. military understands this.”

John Foster and Alka Bhave

Titles: Chief impact officer and president, Fearless Digital

Since: 2023

One of Baltimore's largest technology companies added three C-suite positions to guide the firm as it branches into a new industry.

Fearless last year created two new divisions, Fearless Digital, and Fearless Guides, as part of a broader corporate restructuring. Fearless promoted John Foster to chief impact officer and brought in newcomers Alka Bhave and Will Seamans as the president of Fearless Digital and Fearless Guides, respectively.The two branches are intended to help Fearless grow to earn $1 billion in revenue by diversifying its customer base.

Foster will focus on the impact vision for the company across all of Fearless's entities and the larger ecosystem. He is also working with private companies to advance corporate responsibility initiatives. Foster has a long history with the company. He began working with Fearless in 2010 and served as chief operating officer before getting the title change.

Fearless Guides, led by Seamans, will help the company gain a new revenue stream, organizational management. Fearless Guides will help companies reform their internal organizations so they can use the advanced software Fearless offers. The company raised $17 million in financing to set up the new division and prepare to expand through acquisitions. Seamans joined Fearless when it acquired his company, Unison Solutions in December. Fearless Digitial will focus on the company’s traditional software business. Bhava is a newcomer to the area’s technology scene, previously working at Arlington, Virginia, nonprofit Riverside Research. Riverside promotes research that could benefit national security, like metaverse programs that can train U.S. soldiers. That experience working with the government makes her a strong fit for Fearless since the company has many contracts with agencies like the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.