Seattle-based data management company Qumulo is welcoming back co-founder Aaron Passey.
Passey co-founded Qumulo in 2012 with Neal Fachan and Peter Godman, but left the company in 2016, according to his LinkedIn page. Passey will help lead Qumulo's engineering team with Chief Technology Officer Kiran Bhageshpur, the company said.
"It’s wonderful to have (Passey) rejoin our team,” Bhageshpur said in a news release. “He has always impressed me as a fearless and imaginative technical leader, and his expertise and vision will be a huge help as we work to accelerate our product innovations.”
After leaving Qumulo, Passey spent about four years at the San Francisco-based file-sharing company Dropbox, where he was a principal engineer at the company, his LinkedIn page shows. Before co-founding Qumulo, Passey was chief technology officer at the database technology company Clustrix, which was acquired by the database company MariaDB Corp. in 2018.
Bhageshpur joined Qumulo in May, and although the company had regional CTOs before him, he was the first to hold the role companywide. He was the co-founder and CEO of a data management company called Igneous before joining Qumulo.
"I’m excited to be part of the team that I founded more than a decade ago," Passey said in the release. “With a great leadership team, happy customers and code that is rock solid, how could I not rejoin? I’m excited to help take things to the next level.”
Molly Brown was previously the vice president of engineering at Qumulo. Brown had been with the company for more than eight years but left in June, according to her LinkedIn page, and she is now a general manager at Amazon Web Services.
Qumulo helps clients store and manage large amounts of data. Its customers include the San Francisco 49ers and the University of Florida. The company raised $125 million in a Series E round in 2020 and reached a value of more than $1.2 billion. In June, however, the company laid off about 80 employees, or more than 18% of its staff.
