– Bellevue, Washington-based identity authentication software company Auth0 appointed former Glassdoor CTO Bhawna Singh as Senior Vice President of Engineering. He will be responsible for the various Auth0 platforms and will oversee the software engineering, data and machine learning teams.
Based in San Francisco, Singh spent more than five years at Glassdoor and was previously the senior director of search intelligence at Ask.com.
Auth0 was acquired by Okta for $ 6.5 billion earlier this year. Following the acquisition, Auth0’s identification platform is now a product unit within Okta that is publicly traded.
The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) promoted University of Washington computer science professor Daniel Weld to general manager and chief scientist of its Semantic Scholar project.
A prominent AI researcher, Weld is also a Venture Partner at Madrona Venture Group. He will join AI2 full time and become a professor emeritus at UW.
Weld succeeds Doug Raymond, former Amazon Alexa Product Lead, project general manager since 2018. Semantic Scholar is a publicly available AI-based search engine for browsing academic research. It currently has 8 million monthly active users.
As part of the transition, Northwestern University professor Doug Downey will succeed Weld as head of the Semantic Scholar Research organization. Additionally, Microsoft alumnus Alex Wade has joined AI2 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is now Director of Strategic Partnerships.
Seattle real estate startup Flyhomes hired Kayti Sullivan as the company’s first chief revenue officer. She most recently was a CRO at The RealReal, a luxury online consignment marketplace and served as an advisor to FlyHomes since the beginning of the year.
Sullivan previously spent more than 12 years at Yelp, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager of his local revenue business. She was also a co-founder of Molly Jones, a female-focused cannabis consultation service.
Flyhomes closed a $ 150 million Series C investment round in June and currently operates in markets in Washington, Oregon, California, Texas and Massachusetts.
—Alline Akintore has joined the Oregon Venture Fund as Director. She was recently a venture fellow at the January Ventures women’s-focused venture fund.
Akintore received his MBA from Stanford last year and was previously COO of RwandaOnline.
Founded by Eric Rosenfeld in 2007, the Oregon Venture Fund focuses on startups in Oregon and Southwest Washington. His portfolio includes BrandLive, Hubb, Rigado, Bright.md among others. The fund was also an early investor in Absci, which went public earlier this year.
– Jeremy Tryba, Senior Vice President of Engineering at Foursquare, has joined Madrona Venture Labs as a Technical Partner. Tryba was a long-time engineering leader at Placed, a Seattle startup acquired by Snap and later sold to Foursquare.
The Seattle startup studio also announced a new technical advisory board that includes FreightWeb co-founder Farah Ali, Zeitworks CEO Jay Bartot, and UW assistant professor Kurtis Heimerl.
Earlier this year, Madrona Venture Labs raised $ 8 million for its fourth fund and unveiled a new model that turns its investors into co-founders, board members and advisors to its startup spin-off.
