Lots of big personnel moves happened in the Boston tech community in March, including C-level appointments and departures. As far as we know, five companies (Aquabotix, Nuance Communications, Parexel, Pixability and Placester) got a new CEO, while two (Circle and Onapsis) have a new CFO. Lionbridge Technologies, a digital communications company based in Waltham, has hired a new CTO.
Notably, at least two moves have something to do with the military. Jennifer Jensen, who began her career in the U.S. Army, is now a VP at Draper, while Admiral James Stavridis, who served as the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO, joined the board of cybersecurity startup PreVeil.
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• Waltham-based 6 River Systems made two additions to its executive team, Naresh Wignarajah and Fergal Glynn, per their LinkedIn profiles. Wignarajah, newly appointed VP of engineering, was previously at Cimpress. Glynn, new VP of marketing, is a former marketing director at Veracode.
• Accelerate, Wentworth’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center, has hired Max Rollinger as their first director of programming.
• The Advanced Cyber Security Center, a collaborative bringing together organizations to solve common cybersecurity problems across Massachusetts and New England, has added Joel Schwartz to its board of directors. Schwartz retired from Dell EMC in 2016.
• Akamai had a few board of directors changes. George Conrades announced his retirement as chairman of the board, and Frederic Salerno will take his place. Tom Killalea, formerly the chief information security officer of Amazon, is also joining the company's board of directors.
• Whitney Million will take over the role of CEO at Aquabotix on April 18. A former executive at defense contractor BAE Systems, she is replacing David Batista, who was appointed to the CEO job in November 2017. The company has had three CEOs in four months, BBJ reported.
• Former Brightcove CEO David Mendels listed two new positions on his LinkedIn account: Mendels is currently the director of WITNESS and an advisor at Movement Voter Project. Mendels resigned as Brightcove CEO in July last year.
• CarGurus added Greg Schwartz to the board of directors. Schwartz is the chief business officer of Zillow Group.
• Natick-based Centage Corporation announced that Ed Gromann has joined its executive team as chief product officer. Prior to joining Centage, Gromann served as president for Jedox’s American subsidiary.
• Fintech company Circle has a new CFO, treasurer and EVP of risk. Naeem Ishaq was previously at Square, Salesforce and most recently CFO of Boxed.
• Jackie Lender is no longer startup manager of the City of Boston. Jackie is headed down to New York City to work in the private sector, then starting at Harvard Business School in the fall.
• Cybereason made two additions to its product team. Hemdat Cohen-Shraga, a former VP of research and development at Matomy Media Group, is joining Cybereason as VP of engineering and will oversee the company’s global engineering team in Tel Aviv. Ronny Maate, a new VP of product at Cybereason, held the same title at fintech company Payoneer.
• A month after its $6 million seed round, Dover Microsystems has added three new hires: Dan Ganousis as director of sales, Susan Stewart as director of finance and Leslie Barthel as director of marketing. Ganousis brings 25 years of experience in the semiconductor industry, formerly with AccelChip; Stewart was a member of the finance team at Draper; Barthel joins Dover from Boston-based IoT company TempAlert.
• Draper, the R&D facility born out of MIT that focuses on technology solutions to problems relevant for the national defense, has a new VP for national security and space. Jennifer Jensen will take on the new role from Sierra Nevada Corporation. Of note, she began her career in the U.S. Army, where she was the first woman distinguished honor graduate of flight school.
• Alo Mukerji was set to start at EnergySage as their product lead on Jan. 1, but as of February, Mukerji is listed on LinkedIn as COO at coUrbanize — an online community outreach platform for real estate developers and municipal planners.
• Everbridge, a critical event management company, has added two new VPs. Jeff Young, VP of corporate communications, was at Akamai for 19 years. Jennifer Sand, VP of product management, was at Cloudlock.
• ezCater has added Jim Rand to their ranks as catering practice leader. Rand has more than 40 years experience in the restaurant industry, having built the catering business at both Panera and P.F. Chang’s.
• Freight Farms announced two additions to its advisory board. The first one is Tom vonReichbauer, a former Tesla and current Nest executive. The company also welcomed Melissa Melshenker Ackerman, an executive VP of sales at Produce Alliance, to the advisory board.
• Humanyze, a Boston-based analytics startup, has added Chris Wysopal, co-founder and CTO at Burlington-based Veracode, to the board of directors.
• HYCU, an enterprise software company specializing in data backup, recovery and monitoring, announced that Simon Taylor will lead HYCU’s worldwide initiatives from the company’s Boston headquarters as the company’s new CEO. Taylor previously served as the president of Comtrade Software and the chief strategy officer of Comtrade Group. Also, the company added Junelle Swan and Scott Henderson to the executive team: Swan joined as VP of channels and Scott Henderson joined as VP of sales, Americas.
• Data storage company INFINIDAT has named Mitch Diodato as director of channel sales for North America. Diodato comes to INFINIDAT from Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions.
• LeaseQ, a Boston-based fintech platform, has added Jamshed Khan as their first CTO. Khan was previously VP of investments technology for Ameriprise Financial.
• Lionbridge Technologies, a digital communications company based in Waltham, has hired a new CTO: Ken Watson, who has most recently served as CTO of fintech company Ipreo. In addition, Lionbridge added Frank Sannella as managing director of the Americas and Camilla De Villiers as managing director of Asia.
• After more than 15 months of silence, the board of Burlington, Mass.-based Nuance Communications has announced the name of the company’s new CEO. Mark Benjamin, who currently serves as president and COO of Georgia-based public electronics company NCR Corp., will take the reins of Nuance on April 23. Benjamin will replace current chairman and CEO Paul Ricci.
• Bike-sharing platform ofo has hired Andrew Daley as the new head of marketing and growth for
North America. Previously, he was a VP of marketing at Zipcar. Daley will still be based in Boston.
• Cybersecurity company Onapsis appointed Gordon Pothier as CFO. Pothier is joining Onapsis from Carbon Black, where he recently held the position of VP of finance and operations.
• Longtime Parexel’s CEO Josef von Rickenbach stepped down from his role on March 15 and he will be replaced by Jamie Macdonald. Von Rickenbach will serve as chairman of the board for the life sciences behemoth.
• Pegasystem has hired Pat Dwyer as VP of sales for communications, media, and consumer services in North America. Dwyer joined the company from Microsoft, where he was a GM of Microsoft Dynamics Business Applications sales.
• Video advertising company Pixability has announced David George as their new CEO. Founder Bettina Hein will now serve as the executive chair of the board. George was previously head of mobile publisher solutions at Facebook, COO at Celtra, and is on Jebbit’s board of directors.
• Placester appointed Omar Hussain, former CEO of Imprivata, as the company's new CEO. He is replacing co-founder Matt Barba, who will assume the CTO position, one that has been left vacant for several months.
• PreVeil, a cybersecurity company that launched an encryption service for email for those with no tech knowledge, has a new member of the board: Admiral James Stavridis, who served as the 16th Supreme Allied Commander at NATO.
• QuickPivot made a bunch of March hires: Tom Winchell, new VP of sales, was previously at Zignal Labs; Joe Melchionda, new VP of implementation services, was most recently at Marketo; Brandon Walters, new VP of sales, Southeast, held roles at Oracle; Phil Mondy, new senior solutions consultant, recently held a similar role at Teradata; last but not least, Stella Chistyakov, new VP of finance, is joining QuickPivot from Profitect.
• The board of directors of Waltham-based Raytheon has elected Adriane M. Brown as a director. Brown was previously president and COO of Intellectual Ventures.
• Sea Machines Robotics, a Boston-based developer of autonomous vessel technology, has hired Peter Hjarbaek Holm as its European director to manage the company’s new Hamburg, Germany, office.
• Local transportation system for students Sheprd has hired Lucy Ai as the new head of revenue. Ai is joining Sheprd from Arconic’s corporate strategy group.
• Tettra, a knowledge management tool, has a new chief revenue officer:Kristen Craft. Previously, Craft has been serving as VP of marketing and business development at Ovia Health.
• Another executive has joined the team of Turbonomic. Chris Gorecki joined the company as VP of global channels and comes from VMware.
• ViralGains has added Mark Connon to its board of directors. Connon was a longtime marketing executive at AOL, Verizon and Oath.
• XebiaLabs, a Burlington-based software company that recently closed a $100 million Series B round, hired Richard Nuñez as the new VP of strategic alliances. Nuñez is a former director of business development at New Relic.
• XL has added new members to its board, including Scott Dupcak from Exelon’s CTV group, and new advisory board member, Rick Wagoner, former CEO of General Motors.
• Laura Scott, VP of supplier operations and international operations at Wayfair, is leaving after an eight-and-a-half year run. She’s taking a break, then will be on the market for a new role.
If you think I’m missing someone from the list, email me at lmaffei@americaninno.com.
