— Ryan Holmes is again leading Hootsuite, a Vancouver, B.C.-based social media management platform. Hootsuite’s focus will be “going even deeper with the businesses we serve, expanding what we can do with data and insights, and investing in AI to help both our customers and ourselves move faster and work smarter,” Holmes said on LinkedIn.
Holmes founded Hootsuite in 2009 and was CEO until 2020, when he transitioned to a board position. He is now interim CEO, taking over from Irina Novoselsky.
Novoselsky became CEO three years ago. In a LinkedIn post, she thanked her team and highlighted their accomplishments, including restoring the company to profitability, building a new enterprise sales engine, and acquiring Talkwalker.
— Scowtt, a Seattle-based startup that wants to reshape how advertisers optimize their returns on ad campaigns, named Madhu Jagannathan as chief financial officer. The startup announced a $12 million Series A funding round in December.
Jagannathan has served as CFO for multiple startups, including WorkWhile, Lob, Inrix, ChefSteps and others. He was a group finance manager for Microsoft earlier in his career, working with the worldwide services division and other divisions.
“I have been incredibly impressed with Madhu’s ability to scale organizations and manage enterprise-grade finance teams,” said Eduardo Indacochea, Scowtt’s CEO, adding that his vision will be “critical” to the company’s next phase of growth.
— Venkat Kavarthapu is CEO of symplr, a Houston company using AI to optimize hospital and health plan operations. Kavarthapu joined from Cotiviti, where he served as executive VP. He was previously CEO of Bellevue, Wash.-based Edifecs, a healthcare payments company that Cotiviti acquired last year.
“After 25+ years in healthcare technology, I’ve seen a lot of change, but one thing hasn’t kept pace: healthcare operations are still too complex, and caregivers are still carrying too much of that burden,” Kavarthapu said on LinkedIn. Symplr, he added, is using AI to address these challenges.
— Seattle-based Liminary named Kevin O’Donnell to the startup’s founding team as its fractional head of growth. He and Liminary founder and CEO Sarah Andrabi overlapped at Dropbox, where O’Donnell served as VP of international growth.
O’Donnell founded Global10x, which provides go-to-market and digital strategy consulting to SaaS companies. His other past roles include more than 15 years at Microsoft and VP of product at Nitro.
Liminary is building AI-native storage and memory technology that automatically recalls material from various sources when needed. “I joined Liminary because Sarah and I share a conviction that the next generation of AI must be both technically rigorous and deliver accurate, verifiable insights while preserving human perspective,” O’Donnell said in a statement.
— Seattle Orcas, a Major League Cricket team, named Sean Cary as CEO, effective April 20. Cary has 25 years of sports leadership experience including roles in cricket, tennis, Australian Rules Football and the sporting goods industry. Early in his career, Cary played cricket for Western Australia.
Seattle Orcas began playing in 2023. Its owners include Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella as as well as current and former Microsoft executives and technology entrepreneurs Soma Somasegar, Sanjay Parthasarathy, Samir Bodas and Ashok Krishnamurthi.
— UserTesting, a Bellevue, Wash.-based company that connects businesses with a global network of testers for user experience research, named Ryan Roland as its chief financial officer. He joins UserTesting from the health tech company Overjet and has held CFO and CEO roles at multiple San Francisco Bay Area companies.
“There’s a real opportunity to help organizations make better decisions by bringing customer context into how they build and operate,” Roland said in a statement.
UserTesting also named Neal Gottsacker as CTO earlier this month.
— Longtime telecommunications leader Patrick Knorr has retired, departing his most recent role as an executive at Astound Business Solutions. Prior to Astound, Knorr was EVP of business solutions for Wave Broadband, a Kirkland, Wash., company acquired by Astound in 2018.
In a LinkedIn post recounting his career, Knorr noted that during his time at Wave the company made more than a dozen acquisitions and with Astound the team became “a truly national commercial brand serving major markets coast to coast.”
— General Fusion, a Vancouver, B.C.-based fusion company, named Wendy Kei to its board of directors. Kei is board chair of Ontario Power Generation, among other board positions.
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