After leading Smartsheet for nearly two decades, Mark Mader is leaving the Bellevue, Wash.-based enterprise software giant.
The company announced Tuesday that Mader is retiring as CEO and will leave the board at the end of September.
Sunny Gupta, co-founder of Apptio and a longtime Seattle tech leader, will step in as executive chair and acting CEO.
The leadership transition comes less than a year after Smartsheet went private in an $8.4 billion deal with Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone.
Mader will remain with the company as an advisor and a “significant investor.” The company’s board has initiated a search for a new permanent CEO.
“Leading Smartsheet has been an incredible honor, and I am deeply proud of the businesses and people we have empowered and what we have built together,” Mader said in a statement. “As the company enters its next phase of growth, this is the right time to transition leadership.”
Gupta has ties to Vista, the Austin, Texas-based private equity giant that acquired Apptio in 2019 for nearly $2 billion.
Mader led Smartsheet since 2006. The company launched a year earlier, and went public in 2018.
Smartsheet makes cloud-based enterprise work management technologies for managing and tracking projects, collaborating, storing data, and automating and assigning tasks, among other capabilities. It has 16.7 million active users and generates more than $1 billion in annual revenue.
In a recent interview with GeekWire, Mader discussed how Smartsheet was using AI — both within the company and in customer-facing features. The Dartmouth grad and former Onyx exec said Smartsheet was channeling its newfound freedom as a private company into “AI-ifying” the business.
The company employs more than 3,000 people worldwide.
Gupta joined the Smartsheet board in January, according to his LinkedIn profile.
Gupta started Apptio in the Bellevue library and his home basement in 2007. The company, which helped customers track and optimize their software spending, went public in 2016.
Four years after the Vista acquisition, IBM bought Apptio in 2023 in a $4.6 billion deal. Gupta stepped down as CEO last year. He’s currently a a general partner at Generative Capital, a Seattle-area investment firm for late-stage enterprise software.
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