The Software Report is honored to announce The Top 50 Women Leaders in Software of 2024. The industry continues to rapidly expand, with artificial intelligence helping companies innovate in ways once thought impossible and more and more industries adopting software solutions to streamline their operations. As more money flows into the sector, these executives have stepped up to take control of their respective segment of their company and deliver outstanding results.
This year’s awardees include founders, CEOs, COOs, VPs and many other positions, working at companies large and small, and hailing from all over the globe—from America to Brazil, India to Australia, and back. Much as these companies are breaking down barriers in the business, these women are breaking down borders to help the world develop new, innovative solutions to the world’s software challenges.
This year’s recipients include Katherine Kostereva, Founder and CEO of Creatio, who stewards an operation that oversees millions of workflows every day. It features Merete Hverven, CEO of Visma, who steered her company through the COVID-19 crisis from her kitchen table. Another honoree, Amanda Piwonka, Chief People Officer at Tebra, who has helped grow the culture at the four-year-old outfit. Lastly, Oana Jinga, Chief Commercial and Product Officer and Co-Founder at Dexory, a London-based robotics company.
Please join us in celebrating The Top 50 Women Leaders in Software of 2024.
1. Katherine Kostereva
Company: Creatio
Title: Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Katherine Kostereva is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Creatio. Creatio is a global provider of a no-code platform designed to automate workflows and CRM with maximum flexibility. Each day, millions of workflows are launched on the platform by thousands of clients across 100 countries. A commitment to genuine care for clients and partners is a core aspect of Creatio’s identity.
Kostereva brings 27 years of experience to her current role. Before joining Creatio, Kostereva was a CEO and managing partner at Terrasoft and before that, Head of Web Development at Softline. Earlier in her career she worked with IBM as a marketing manager.
2. Jill Davie
Company: WorkWave
Title: Senior Vice President & GM
Jill Davie is the Senior Vice President and GM of Cleaning and Security at WorkWave, where she is responsible for customer success management, professional services and customer engagement. She is passionate about operational excellence, engaging directly with customers and attracting and retaining top talent with a people-centric culture.
Davie started her career at TEAM Software as a summer marketing intern in 1996. At the time, TEAM was a start-up with 12 employees. After earning a bachelor’s degree in business administration and marketing from Iowa State University, Davie joined TEAM full time in 1998 as a Sales Associate.
Over the next 20 years, she assumed various leadership roles in sales, marketing, communications, customer success and professional services as the company grew significantly. Davie also served on TEAM’s Board of Directors from 2014 through 2021 when it was acquired by WorkWave.
During her board tenure, TEAM transformed from founder-owned to employee-owned to private equity owned. The company also acquired five companies across the globe, expanding its domestic and international market leadership.
3. Merete Hverven
Company: Visma
Title: Chief Executive Officer
Merete Hverven assumed the role of Chief Executive Officer of Visma in early 2020, just as the world went into lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the initial challenge of taking charge of an international company remotely, Hverven has led Visma through a period of continued growth and geographic expansion, solidifying the group’s position as a leading provider of mission-critical software in Europe and Latin-America.
Visma’s revenue has more than doubled under her leadership, ending at €2.4 billion in 2023, with EBITDA of €705 million. Visma is now the largest privately-owned software business in Europe, present in 33 countries with 16,000 employees. In December 2023, the company was valued at €19 billion in a transaction which attracted €1 billion in investment from 20 new investors, including Altaroc, Jane Street, NPS and NYC Retirement System, in addition to reinvestment from majority owner Hg.
Previously Deputy CEO and Chief HR Officer, Hverven has focused on strengthening Visma’s position through recruiting and retaining the right people, and by working closely with acquisitions and restructurings. She has developed the organization with a strong customer focus while unifying Visma’s culture through go-to-market strategies.
Hverven is a passionate advocate for diversity and equality in the workplace and has initiated several programs aimed at increasing diversity across the organization. With her direct leadership style, ability to execute, and passion for diversity, Hverven is described as a driven, talented and dedicated leader by her colleagues. Her work and dedication have earned her a reputation as an important role model both in and outside Visma.
Before joining Visma in 2011, Hverven held several leading positions at Ernst & Young (now EY). She has a Master’s Degree in Finance and International Leadership from the University of St. Gallen and The Norwegian School of Economics (NHH).
4. Cathie Hall
Company: IFS
Title: Chief Customer Officer
Cathie Hall is the Chief Customer Officer at IFS, where she leads all aspects of its customer facing services organization, providing consulting, success, cloud and support services which enable customer transformations.
Hall brings her passion for the customer from her previous role as Senior Vice President Experience at IFS. Her Total Experience Vision to enable all IFS customers to have a frictionless journey to value realization transformed IFS to be focused on what matters most to customers, helping to spur its global growth.
Hall is fearless in her challenge of the status quo and is driven to productize and automate the customer experience from sales to delivery and adoption. She led the thinking and execution on the role of AI to deliver an industry revolution in how customers take on large digital transformations.
Prior to IFS Hall spent 20 years in the ERP industry and worked on the transition to SaaS as CEO of Syspro Europe. Hall’s commercial and operational experience positions her perfectly to understand what customers need and create a culture where IFS teams empathize and innovate to exceed expectations.
5. Helen Cook
Company: Finastra
Title: Chief People Officer
Helen Cook is the Chief People Officer of Finastra. Cook takes global responsibility for the People and Internal Communications organization and for advancing Finastra’s aspiration to be the most inclusive and diverse employer in the fintech industry.
She is particularly passionate about building a curious and well-tooled workforce, supporting employees to develop skills which keep them relevant, engaged and growing. Developing the company’s global talent and ensuring a truly inclusive workplace is her priority.
Cook was previously at Natwest Group, where she was a member of the executive team and held the position of Chief Human Resources Officer. She has an incredible wealth of expertise including extensive global exposure in all aspects of people strategy. Her career spans more than 25 years in financial services, including experience at Deutsche Bank and Morgan Stanley.
Helen graduated from Cambridge University and is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel. In addition to her role at Finastra, she has served on the board of the Financial Services Skills Commission and on the advisory board of Ivy House. She also serves as a mentor for the FTSE 100 Mentoring Foundation.
6. Inna Landman
Company: Procore Technologies
Title: Chief People Officer
Inna Landman is Chief People Officer at Procore Technologies. In this role, she spearheads the company’s people strategy and the critical functions that bring it to life, including talent acquisition, talent development, total rewards, HR business partnering, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEIB), and talent operations and shared services. Landman is passionate about fostering a values-led culture that unlocks human potential to drive business results.
Prior to joining Procore, Landman spent more than a decade at Workday, holding a variety of senior leadership roles, most recently as Senior Vice President of Talent Acquisition, People Experience and Insight. At Workday, Landman played a critical role in the company’s expansion from 2,500 to 20,000 employees, building and leading a team dedicated to recruiting exceptional talent and utilizing data analytics and technology to enhance the employee experience. Her efforts were pivotal to cultivating Workday’s culture during a period of hyper-growth while scaling the business.
Prior to Workday, Landman held HR leadership roles at organizations including Target, T-Mobile, Diamond Foods, and Oracle. She holds a master’s degree in human resources from Golden Gate University and a bachelor’s degree in business management from Arizona State University.
7. Tania Garrett
Company: Unit4
Title: Chief People Officer
Tania Garrett is the Chief People Officer of Unit4. Unit4's next-generation enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions power many of the world's mid-market organizations, bringing together the capabilities of financials, procurement, project management, HR, and FP&A to share real-time information and deliver greater insights to help organizations become more effective.
With a passion for driving business results through people, during her three years with Unit4, Tania has over seen the introduction of talent programs aimed at building the best leaders for Unit4. She has focused on implementing inclusive wellbeing programs including employee wellbeing days and mental health support. She also built a flexible working and DEI strategy focusing on building an inclusive and diverse workforce for Unit4.
8. Olivia Nottebohm
Company: Box
Title: Chief Operating Officer
Olivia Nottebohm is Chief Operating Officer at Box, where she oversees the global go-to-market organization, including Sales, Customer Success, and Marketing.
Nottebohm is an experienced technology executive who has excelled in leadership roles at several technology and software companies. At Google, Nottebohm led sales and product operations and strategy for the Americas Ads business. She then served as VP of SMB and GTM Operations for Google Cloud. She grew revenue of the SMB business by more than 5x, while also leading GTM Strategy and Operations globally for Google Cloud across all segments.
Most recently, Nottebohm was Chief Revenue Officer of Notion, a cloud-based productivity platform, and she previously served as the COO of Dropbox. Earlier in her career, Olivia was a partner at McKinsey & Company, focused on the software industry.
Nottebohm is a member of the Board of Directors of AppFolio (APPF), a real estate vertical software company, and Lightmatter, a photonic company reinventing AI computing. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Harvard University and an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
9. Sally Thayer
Company: Phreesia
Title: Vice President of Product Management
Sally Thayer is the Vice President of Product Management for Phreesia, a publicly traded SaaS company that creates customized patient intake solutions for healthcare organizations. In her role, Sally oversees Phreesia’s patient engagement applications and manages multiple product teams that develop and enhance software to deliver innovative and user-friendly solutions for healthcare organizations. These teams are responsible for patient registration, communication, clinical documentation, and user experience (UX), with the UX team formed under Thayer’s leadership.
During her nine-year tenure with Phreesia, she took the lead in improving the quality and accessibility of Phreesia's products, including the addition of multi-language capabilities to the company’s text messaging and mobile check-in services. In addition, she managed the development and launch of three generations of hardware solutions and spearheaded the evolution of the patient intake process, expanding it into mobile devices. Thayer also led the development of products beyond ambulatory care into acute, urgent care, and emergency department settings.
Prior to joining Phreesia, Thayer spent seven years in product management with HealthStream, assisted in executing clinical trials and served on the institutional review board at Centerstone, one of the nation’s largest behavioral healthcare organizations. Sally holds an MBA from Vanderbilt University and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Duke University.
10. Denise Garth
Company: Majesco
Title: Chief Strategy Officer
Denise Garth is Majesco’s Chief Strategy Officer, responsible for leading marketing, industry relations and innovation in support of Majesco’s client centric strategy, working closely with Majesco customers, partners and the industry.
Garth is a recognized Top 50 InsurTech Influencer and industry leader with both P&C and L&A insurance experience as a CIO and business executive with deep international ties in Asia and Europe through her ACORD leadership role. Garth is an acknowledged strategic thinker, innovation leader, international speaker, and author of articles regarding the key issues and opportunities facing the industry today to prepare for the future.
Prior to joining Majesco, Garth held business and technology senior executive roles with leading insurance companies, including Mutual of Omaha, CUNA Mutual and Century Cos. of America. At ACORD, she was Vice President of Standards and Membership driving ACORD’s international expansion and market presence.
While at Innovation Group, she was EVP of Strategic Marketing and Global Head of Market Strategy, where she re-established the company’s position through market-driven strategy and solutions. Most recently, she was partner and Chief Digital Officer with Strategy Meets Action, leading the Innovation Practice, evaluating emerging technologies, outside industry trends, and innovation and their implications and opportunities for the industry.
Garth holds a bachelor’s degree in math and computer science from Central College in Iowa, has completed MBA work at the University of Northern Iowa, and has attended various executive leadership programs.
11. Amy Reichanadter
Company: Databricks
Title: Chief People Officer
Amy Reichanadter is the Chief People Officer of Databricks. More than 10,000 organizations worldwide — including Block, Comcast, Condé Nast, Rivian, Shell and more than 60 percent of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform to take control of their data and put it to work with AI.
Reichanadter brings to Databricks more than 20 years of experience designing and implementing innovative, results-oriented people programs in high-growth environments. She leads all of the company’s global HR programs, including talent acquisition, total rewards, performance enablement, learning and development, and diversity and inclusion.
Prior to joining Databricks, Reichanadter served as the Chief People Officer at Adaptive Insights, a Workday company, for five years, and was responsible for leading human resources worldwide. Preceding Adaptive Insights, Reichanadter was the Senior Vice President of Human Resources at E2open for eight years.
Reichanadter holds a doctorate in clinical psychology from Palo Alto University, a master’s degree in counseling psychology from Santa Clara University, and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles.
12. Robin Merritt
Company: Gainsight
Title: Chief People Officer
Robin Merritt serves as Chief People Officer at Gainsight, where she leads global people strategy across 16 countries, 3 continents, and 1,000 employees. Her portfolio spans employee and organizational success, diversity, equity and inclusion, talent acquisition, the office of the CEO, business operations, and social impact.
Merritt founded Pulse Impact, the first-ever Customer Success social responsibility program designed to address systemic challenges like job creation, lack of diversity, and income inequality in the customer success industry. Robin trailblazed the transformation of SaaS’s double bottom line—profit and people—by raising more than $2 million for global giving and spearheading Gainsight’s global impact initiatives.
Before joining Gainsight, Robin built her career at some of the world’s most influential organizations, including Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world. In 2015 she joined Box where, on the CEO’s team, she directed global internal communications across 4 continents, 9 countries, and more than 2,000 employees. Robin holds a bachelor’s degree in communications and marketing from Fairfield University.
13. Amanda Piwonka
Company: Tebra
Title: Chief People Officer
As Chief People Officer of People for Tebra, a leading cloud-based healthcare technology platform, Amanda Piwonka empowers Tebra’s people and aligns personal achievement to company objectives to drive results, accountability, and growth. In 2021, Kareo and PatientPop merged to form Tebra and Piwonka eagerly accepted the opportunity to oversee people and culture. Piwonka joined Kareo in 2015 as Vice President of Human Resources.
At Tebra, Piwonka brings extensive knowledge in leadership development, compensation and benefits design, talent management, and people process and system design. She is especially passionate about building people-centered programs that focus on the employees who develop and drive a customer-centric culture. This allows employees to drive customer success and ultimately Tebra’s success.
Prior to joining Kareo, Piwonka led human resources for the Americas division of Cushman & Wakefield (formerly DTZ). While there, she standardized processes to optimize the people function and deliver a best-in-class employee experience and also developed short-term incentive programs that focused on driving year-over-year profit margin growth.
As Head of Human Resources for Newmark Knight Frank, Piwonka was instrumental in the merger of Newmark Knight Frank and Grubb & Ellis. She led the integration of the two companies from a people perspective, including talent acquisition, compensation and benefits, payroll, and systems and talent management. Piwonka focused on efficiencies and drove a total of more than $10 million in cost reduction based on the system and process integrations. Earlier in her career, Piwonka also held human resource leadership positions at Lennar, Corp and CBRE.
Amanda holds an MBA from the University of Phoenix and a bachelor’s degree in business administration from California Polytechnic State University, Pomona.
14. Kerry Acocella
Company: Datadog
Title: General Counsel
In her role as General Counsel, Kerry Acocella oversees all legal matters at Datadog, from day-to-day compliance matters to strategic transactions. Datadog is the observability and security platform for cloud applications. Its SaaS platform integrates and automates infrastructure monitoring, application performance monitoring, log management, user experience monitoring, cloud security and many other capabilities to provide unified, real-time observability and security for its customers’ entire technology stack.
Prior to Datadog, Acocella held senior legal positions in public companies across a wide range of industries. Acocella began her legal career at Morrison & Foerster. She holds a JD from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and a bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Georgia.
15. Reeny Sondhi
Company: Twilio
Title: Chief Digital Officer
Reeny Sondhi is the Chief Digital Officer of Twilio. Leading companies trust Twilio's Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) to build direct, personalized relationships with their customers everywhere in the world. Twilio enables companies to use communications and data to add intelligence and security to every step of the customer journey, from sales to marketing to growth, customer service, and many more engagement use cases in a flexible, programmatic way.
Sondhi is a strategic senior technology executive, specializing in driving technology and security transformations at scale, from startups to Fortune 500 technology leaders, including Twilio, Autodesk, and EMC/Dell. She has been repeatedly entrusted with building technical organizations from the ground up and transforming fragmented organizational functions into cohesive, collaborative environments.
As a thought leader, speaker, and author, Sondhi brings more than 25 years of experience in delivering strategic and technical products and services that mitigate organizational risk while aligning with enterprise risk appetite through innovative, scalable security programs.
Previously, Sondhi was Chief Security Officer at Autodesk, and, before that, Senior Director of Security Engineering and Assurance at EMC. Earlier in her career she worked with AccuSoft Corp. as an internet product manager. Sondhi earned an undergraduate degree in electronics engineering from Government Engineering College in Bhopal, India.
16. Kody Gurfein
Company: Exiger
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Kody Gurfein is the Chief Marketing Officer at leading supply chain and third party risk AI company Exiger, where she has built an award-winning marketing team that has successfully grown Exiger’s brand awareness, educated diverse private and public sectors on the importance of supply chain visibility, and shaped the way stakeholders think about the role of AI in mitigating complex, global risks.
Gurfein has worked to clearly articulate Exiger’s mission to make the world a safe and transparent place to succeed in market. Under her market leadership, Exiger has dramatically expanded its media presence and thought leadership, and has been recognized by Fast Company’s Brands That Matter for two consecutive years.
She also oversaw the launch of Exiger’s first-ever brand campaign, “Save the Day,” which spotlights the powerful impact supply chain professionals have around the world. The campaign garnered over 1 million impressions in the first week alone after launching at Gartner’s Supply Chain Symposium/Xpo™–complete with creative activations like custom superhero caricature drawings and take-home coloring books.
Gurfein and her team’s accomplishments have been recognized by The STEVIE American Business Awards, which named Gurfein Marketing Executive of the Year, and OnConferences, which presented the marketing team with the Icon Team Award.
A passionate leader and mentor, Gurfein founded and chairs Exiger WINs (Women’s Initiative Network) designed to close the gender gap in STEM fields and works closely with Exiger’s NGO partners including The Anti-Slavery Collective and Hope for Justice / Slave Free Alliance. She was a founding member of Exiger’s charitable initiative, Exiger Cares, and also lends her expertise and enthusiasm to platforms outside of Exiger. Gurfein is a thought leader on emerging issues, contributing to Korn Ferry’s report on The Expanding Role of the Technology CMO, and a member of the Forbes Communication Council, Chief and Fast Company’s Executive Board.
17. Kim Salem-Jackson
Company: Akamai Technologies
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Kim Salem-Jackson is Executive Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer, leading Akamai’s global marketing efforts including brand, purpose, corporate communications, product marketing, field marketing, and digital marketing, as well as the company’s customer enablement programs.
Salem-Jackson is a data-driven, global marketing executive whose 20-plus-year career has been focused on activating marketing as a growth engine and amplifying marketing’s impact on the business.
Previously, she served as Akamai’s Senior Vice President of Global Marketing and Corporate Communications, where she led global field marketing, customer marketing, channel marketing, events, corporate communications, and the sales development organization. Salem-Jackson also serves on the board of directors of the Akamai Foundation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism and mass communications from the University of South Carolina.
18. Brooke Brockman
Company: Buildertrend
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Brooke Brockman is a marketing practitioner and champion of a connected customer experience. She serves as the CMO of Buildertrend, a B2B SaaS company offering the leading business management software for the residential construction industry.
With deep cross-industry sales, marketing and account management experience, her career has spanned roles on large teams at corporations including Target and UPS, and multi-faceted roles at smaller agencies. Brockman has assembled a rich professional career, mastering the strategic side of sales and marketing and helping organizations to do the same. Brockman’s full stack team at Buildertrend drives demand generation, content marketing, and brand strategy as well as an end-to-end digital customer journey.
Brockman holds a bachelor’s degree in business from Iowa State University.
19. Cara Christopher
Company: Lightcast
Title: Executive Vice President, Marketing
Cara Christopher is the head of marketing at Lightcast, where she is responsible for the strategic marketing and communications of the growing business. Lightcast is a labor market insights company powering strategic workforce decisions for Fortune 100 companies, higher education institutions, and governments around the world. Christopher started at the company seven years ago and moved her way up through the company by leading and scaling GTM teams.
In that time she helped establish Lightcast as the global authority on labor market intelligence through thought leadership, SEO, and high-profile media exposure, earning a consistent 70 percent share of voice. With a 7X ROI in digital-first initiatives, she built an inbound engine that increased marketing-attributed sales from 10 percent to 50 percent in 2 years, scaling the company revenue growth by 5X.
Her leadership has played a significant role in a marketing program that drives both revenue and impact. In addition to growth, Christopher supports an important purpose for Lightcast: creating a labor market that works for everyone. In 2024, Christopher spearheaded the company’s first-ever Impact Report, which documented the amazing contributions for how labor market data is driving workforce transformation, where more people are getting upskilled or placed into better paying jobs.
Prior to Lightcast, Christopher spent 10 years in enrollment marketing at various higher education institutions and holds her MBA with a marketing concentration from Washington State University.
20. Megan Maslanka
Company: Starburst
Title: Chief People Officer
Megan Maslanka oversees Starburst's global people and culture, information technology, and business applications teams. Starburst, the Open Hybrid Lakehouse, is the leading end-to-end data platform to securely access, analyze, and share data for SQL analytics and AI across hybrid, on-premises, and multi-cloud environments. With her focus on efficiently and effectively driving business strategy through people and processes, she is responsible for the strategy and execution of areas including talent development, recruiting and retention, culture, and scaling the business globally.
With a distinguished career in HR leadership, she has held senior roles at Five9, DocuSign and Buildertrend, where she drove initiatives to enhance employee engagement, leadership development, and organizational effectiveness. Prior to that, she led the Customer Success team at Quantum Workplace, a performance and employee engagement software company. Maslanka brings deep expertise in building inclusive, high-performance workplaces that align with business needs.
21. Katie Gross
Company: Suzy
Title: President
Katie Gross is the President of Suzy. A long-time MRX veteran, Gross understands the importance of bringing consumers into every business decision. Her deep understanding of the full market research value chain stems from 18 years of international experience across every facet of the industry, working with insights agencies Mintel and Stylus, individual brands at Avilton Foods, and even within the world of programmatic survey sampling at Cint and Toluna.
Now in her role as President, she leads Suzy’s strategic vision while overseeing the Sales, Customer Success, and Market Research Center of Excellence teams to ensure Suzy provides best-in-class customer service and delivers exceptional insights to its roster of enterprise clients.
Outside of work, Gross tirelessly advocates for women in the workplace, with an added focus on fostering financial independence. She counts herself a member of Women In Research’s WIR exec program, all-female leadership network Chief, and the Financial Gym.
22. Elizabeth Davies
Company: Verkada
Title: Chief Privacy Officer
Elizabeth Davies is the Chief Privacy Officer of Verkada. Designed with simplicity in mind, Verkada's six product lines — video security cameras, access control, environmental sensors, alarms, workplace, and intercoms — provide unparalleled building security through an integrated, secure cloud-based software platform.
Davies is a data privacy, protection and security leader with more than 10 years of experience developing and managing global privacy, financial services, healthcare, and security programs cross-functionally. She is a strategic thinker and problem-solver focused on finding risk-based solutions to challenging legal and regulatory issues in the areas of cloud computing (SaaS), data protection, software solutions (products), big data, and analytics.
Before joining Verkada, Davies was Senior Director, Global Head of Data Protection, Privacy and Security and DPO at Splunk, and, before that, a senior legal counsel at Advent Software. Earlier in her career she worked with E.piphany, as a senior counsel. Davies graduated from James E. Beasley School of Law at Temple University with a JD in law and from Tufts University with an undergraduate degree in international relations and French.
23. Elizabeth Barat
Company: AppFolio
Title: Chief People Officer
Elizabeth Barat is Chief People Officer for AppFolio, responsible for ensuring AppFolio is a destination where employees can build their careers while making a positive impact on people’s lives, ultimately driving AppFolio’s business forward. AppFolio is a technology leader driving innovation in the real estate industry. Its advanced platform and trusted partnerships aim to empower customers to connect communities, enhance operational efficiency, and accelerate business growth.
Most recently, Barat served as Senior Vice President of People, where she led a team of HR business partners, operations, learning and development, talent management, and diversity and inclusion experts who diagnose AppFolio’s people and organizational needs, provide guidance and support, and design and deliver programs aimed at enabling and growing current and future leaders of the company. Earlier in her career, Barat held roles in organizational effectiveness, people development, and general HR management at Sonos and Target Corporation. Barat holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from San Francisco State University.
24. Thea Watson
Company: BrightHR
Title: Chief International Growth and Marketing Officer
Thea Watson is the Chief International Growth and Marketing Officer at BrightHR. With more than 17 years of strategic marketing expertise, Watson has been instrumental in driving BrightHR’s global growth and transforming its marketing strategy since joining the company in November 2022.
Watson is known for her ability to anticipate market shifts and adapt strategies accordingly. Her success at BrightHR builds on her stellar track record at Hays, where she led the brand strategy during the acquisition of Veredus in the U.S., transforming the Canadian brand into a market leader. Her experience establishing global marketing programs, including Hays’ leading technology practice and the Thrive learning platform during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlights her innovative and customer-centric approach.
At BrightHR, Watson has been pivotal in aligning the product roadmap with customer feedback, ensuring that product launches address real world challenges faced by SMEs and larger enterprises. Her contributions have fueled BrightHR’s ability to deliver value-added products and features that resonate with its client base.
Her ability to integrate marketing, sales, and product development has delivered remarkable results. Under Thea’s leadership, BrightHR has exceeded its ambitious growth targets, achieved year-on-year growth and nearly doubled its EBITDA as of April 2024, simultaneously creating a collaborative environment that breaks down silos between departments and encourages innovation. Her ability to unify teams and align efforts across departments has been integral to BrightHR’s growth strategy.
Watson’s focus on market trends and customer needs has ensured that BrightHR remains competitive and relevant in the dynamic HR tech landscape. For example, she spearheaded the launch of an enhanced all-in-one payroll solution in August 2023, driving £720,000 in revenue from client acquisitions within three months. This initiative also supported BrightHR’s successful penetration into the larger enterprise market, resulting in a 38 percent increase in leads among businesses with more than 100 employees.
25. Miriam Connaughton
Company: Simpplr
Title: Chief People & Experience Officer
Miriam Connaughton is the Chief People and Experience Officer of Simpplr. Simpplr is the leading AI-powered employee experience platform. Organizations use Simpplr's forward-looking, adaptable products to deliver personalized experiences that inspire and engage their employees.
Connaughton is a seasoned leader with more than three decades of business and human resources (HR) experience. She joined Simpplr to run and scale the people function and amplify Simpplr's employee experience (EX) and HR presence and voice in the market. Connaughton previously consulted with Simpplr on product development, sales, and marketing, bringing an impactful HR perspective and advancements to all these areas.
Before joining Simpplr, Connaughton ran a successful HR consulting business. Prior to her consulting business, she was a partner in EY's People Advisory business and held senior positions for more than 20 years with Willis Towers Watson. With her vast experience working across diverse industries, Connaughton has helped organizations develop people strategies that effectively tackle intricate and complex challenges, and shape employee experience.
Connaughton graduated from the University of Warwick’s Warwick Business School with an MBA, from the University of Birmingham with a master’ degree in applied geophysics, and from Aston University with an undergraduate degree in geology and physics.
27. Wendy Gonzalez
Company: Sama
Title: CEO
Wendy Gonzalez is the CEO of Sama. Sama is a global leader in data annotation and model evaluation solutions for computer vision, generative AI, and other major applications of artificial intelligence. Gonzalez has served as President and Chief Operating Officer at Sama since 2018, having stepped into the role of Interim CEO.
With more than two decades of managerial and technology leadership experience at organizations including EY, Capgemini Consulting, and Cycle30 (acquired by Arrow Electronics), Gonzalez also serves as an active board member of the Leila Janah Foundation. Gonzalez graduated from the University of Washington with an undergraduate degree in business administration, accounting, and information systems.
28. Kim Crawford Goodman
Company: Smarsh
Title: CEO
Kim Crawford Goodman is the Chief Executive Officer at Smarsh. Smarsh enables regulated organizations of all sizes to capture, archive, and monitor data from business communications to help identify regulatory and reputational risks before those risks become fines or headlines.
Goodman has leadership responsibility for all strategic and operating elements of this dynamic, growing business. Smarsh has leading edge technologies (cloud native, AI, and integrated platforms) to enable clients to reduce their risk and meet their compliance requirements across a growing employee base enabled with expanding communication tools.
Before joining Smarsh, Goodman was the Head of Payments and Risk Solutions at Fiserv, Inc., a Fortune 500 company. With more than 25 years’ experience, she has held key leadership positions with many of the largest brands across financial services and technology, including American Express, Worldpay US, Dell, and Bain & Company. Goodman has extensive experience with global, complex businesses, requiring strategic customer relationships, a deep understanding of critical business drivers, and effective engagement of a large, distributed workforce.
Goodman holds a degree in engineering and political science from Stanford University and an MBA from the Harvard Business School.
29. Alison Holmlund
Company: Filevine
Title: Chief Customer Officer
Alison Holmlund is the Chief Customer Officer of Filevine. Filevine is changing the way legal work gets done for law practitioners and their clients. As the leading legal work platform, Filevine is dedicated to empowering all organizations with tools to simplify and elevate complex, high-stakes legal work.
Prior to joining Filevine, Holmlund served as Chief Operating Officer of Lookback, a customer research platform trusted by Fortune 500 tech companies. Earlier in her career, she served on the executive teams of Mixpanel, a product analytics platform, Planful (formerly Host Analytics), a corporate finance platform, and Proofpoint, an enterprise security platform, where she helped lead the company from pre-revenue to IPO.
Throughout her career, Holmlund has developed innovative strategies to increase customer satisfaction, improve lifetime value, and deliver world-class customer experiences. Holmlund graduated from New York University with an undergraduate degree in computer science and mathematics.
30. Vidya Rao
Company: Genpact
Title: Chief Information and Transformation Officer
Vidya Rao is Genpact’s Chief Information and Transformation Officer. Genpact is a global professional services and solutions firm focused on delivering outcomes that shape the future. With a workforce of more than 125,000 employees across more than 30 countries, the company is driven by curiosity, entrepreneurial agility, and a commitment to creating lasting value for its clients.
With more than 30 years of experience in large scale transformation initiatives, Rao is advancing Genpact’s technology capabilities to build its best credentials and establish Genpact as a beacon of AI-led transformation. Rao’s role also includes driving the global ERP program and collaborating within Genpact’s partner ecosystem to support transformation at scale. Prior to Genpact, Rao worked with Accenture, performing diverse roles and leading technology delivery for multinational clients. She also served on the board of Microfocus PLC until its acquisition by OpenText. Rao has a degree in science, majoring in statistics from the Mumbai University, India.
31. Pam Dearen
Company: Bigtincan
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
As Chief Marketing Officer of Bigtincan, Pam Dearen is responsible for driving revenue growth and enhancing brand reputation by aligning marketing efforts with the company’s overarching business objectives. Dearen has served as a leader in the tech industry for more than 25 years, successfully navigating mergers, divestitures and acquisitions of enormous size and consequence, including the incorporation of her marketing organization at Electronic Data Systems (EDS) into Hewlett Packard.
She has a history of transformation, leading the way into digital marketing and delivering sales and marketing enablement solutions pre-dating the official category of enablement. After more than 20 years in enterprise IT and leading marketing for a Silicon Valley start-up, she joined Bigtincan in 2020 to be a part of taking the company to the next level. During her tenure, Dearen has established Bigtincan as a dominant and growing player in the market during the company’s explosion of growth from $35 million to more than $100 million.
32. Elisha Elliott
Company: Constellation1
Title: Senior Vice President, Customer Experience
Elisha Elliott is the Senior Vice President of Customer Experience at Constellation1, a portfolio of independently operating proptech brands within Constellation Software. Following the recent unification of two Constellation business groups, Elliott was promoted to her current role after just three months with the company. She now leads the global customer experience teams across the entire organization, overseeing 27 products and more than 5,000 customer interactions per month.
Elliott is a visionary executive with extensive experience driving success in global, complex businesses. In her previous roles, she spearheaded a transformative initiative that seamlessly migrated 100 percent of clientele from on-premise to the cloud in under two years. This achievement not only met all objectives but also sustained an impressive 95.5 percent client retention rate and delivered a 2.3x increase in current client annual contract value. Her focus on revenue growth and customer retention has driven record-breaking successes across the organizations she has served.
Beyond her professional accomplishments, Elliott is celebrated as an inspiring leader who ignites passion through her storytelling, mentorship, and fearless advocacy for women. Elliott is known for cultivating collaborative environments and setting high-performance standards within her teams.
33. Paige Schaffer
Company: Iris Powered by Generali
Title: Chief Executive Officer
Paige Schaffer is the Chief Executive Officer at Iris, a B2B2C global identity and cyber protection company owned by the 190-year-old multinational insurance company Generali. Iris opened its first Washington, DC office in 1982 with a simple mission: to bring customers from distress to relief, anytime, anywhere.
Schaffer drives the strategies around growth, product evolution, and domestic and global expansion, ensuring Generali’s team is energized and engaged in its business and that its clients and their customers are happy. Leveraging her subject matter expertise of more than 17 years in identity and cyber protection and restoration services, particularly as they apply to B2B2C software-as-a-service (SaaS), Schaffer was the visionary behind the creation and evolution of Iris’ innovative identity and cyber protection services.
Her solid balance of traditional business leadership, 15 years executive experience working with SaaS companies in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, and oversight in Iris securing multiple multimillion-dollar contracts with Fortune 500 companies helped Iris expand into 112 countries worldwide with unique, country-specific services, and grew the product to encompass personal cyber and device protection services.
Schaffer has multiple industry board seats and officer experience (with boards including the UT Austin Center for Identity and the Identity Theft Resource Center) and is one of two female CEOs out of 60 across the globe for Generali’s broader parent executive group. Schaffer has FBI Citizen Academy certification with a focus on cybercrime and has been a judge for the Malcolm Baldridge National Service Award, the only service award awarded by the President of the United States. Schaffer’s industry expertise as a thought leader in cyber and identity protection and fraud restoration is featured regularly in the press.
34. Christie Lindstrom
Company: iGrafx
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Christie Lindstrom brings more than 15 years of leadership and marketing experience to her role as Chief Marketing Officer at iGrafx. She is responsible for leading all aspects of the company’s global go-to-market strategy including field, product, and partner marketing, demand generation, customer advocacy and digital. Most recently, Lindstrom held leadership roles at Basis Technologies and Worksoft. She has a track record of building effective teams and growing technology companies. Her passion lies in creating market awareness for innovative software solutions that help enterprises achieve a competitive edge.
35. Michelle Korte
Company: Tive
Title: Chief Customer Officer
Michelle Korte is the Chief Customer Officer at Tive, a global leader in supply chain and logistics visibility technology. An accomplished executive with 15 years of experience in logistics, supply chain, SaaS, and IoT, Korte has a proven track record of driving customer success, operational excellence, and revenue growth. She oversees all aspects of Tive’s customer-facing support and SaaS services organization, including account management, customer support, managed services, and reverse logistics. Her focus is on aligning organizational goals with customer needs to deliver exceptional value and foster long-term partnerships.
Since joining Tive, Korte has been instrumental in building and scaling high-performing teams. Under her leadership, these teams have played a critical role in driving Tive’s success, directly contributing to the company’s impressive 55 percent year-over-year revenue growth. Known for her hands-on leadership and commitment to collaboration, Korte continues to empower Tive to exceed customer expectations and achieve long-term success. Her strategic leadership and customer-centric approach have positioned Tive as a leader in the industry.
Korte is passionate about creating customer-focused strategies that drive measurable outcomes, including increased satisfaction, loyalty, and profitability. She is dedicated to mentoring future leaders, fostering innovation, and empowering Tive customers to run best-in-class supply chains. Korte holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Florida State University.
36. Tifenn Dano Kwan
Company: Amplitude
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
As Chief Marketing Officer at Amplitude, Tifenn Dano Kwan’s mission is to shape the future of work through superior digital experiences, great teams, and advanced technology. At Amplitude, she leads its global marketing strategy and team. Amplitude is the leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. Almost 3,500 customers, including Atlassian, NBCUniversal, Under Armour, Shopify, and Jersey Mike’s, rely on Amplitude to gain self-service visibility into the entire customer journey.
Prior to joining Amplitude, Kwan was CMO at Collibra, Dropbox, SAP Ariba, and SAP Fieldglass. She graduated from ICES - Institut catholique de Vendée with a masters of law, and from Audencia with a master’s degree in business administration and general management.
37. Frida Ahrenby
Company: Rillion
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Frida Ahrenby is the Chief Marketing Officer at Rillion, where she leads global marketing efforts with a focus on expanding the company’s brand presence through strategic campaigns, effective positioning, and collaboration across departments. With expertise in leadership, organizational structure, building high-performing and motivated teams, and revenue marketing, Ahrenby has established herself as a marketing leader in the SaaS industry.
Over the past decade, Ahrenby has been part of several significant growth journeys. At Bambora, she contributed to the company’s success, culminating in its sale to Ingenico in 2017 for €1.5 billion. Later, at GetAccept, she played a key role in scaling the company from 60 to 200 employees and growing the marketing team from 3 to 20 members in fewer than three years. These experiences have given her deep insights into how to rapidly scale performance-driven teams and businesses while fostering a company culture where people thrive and work collaboratively to achieve exceptional results.
Ahrenby is passionate about leadership and building motivated, growth-oriented teams. She thrives on seeing people grow and develop, and she brings a people-first mindset to all her endeavors. Her ability to leverage data-driven insights ensures that marketing strategies resonate with target audiences, creating long-term value for clients and driving sustained growth.
38. Kristen Wright
Company: Arcoro
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Kristen Wright is the Chief Marketing Officer of Arcoro. A rapidly growing SaaS company, Arcoro offers proven modular HR solutions for construction and field-based industries. The company’s leading product suite and software platform offers end-to-end HR functionality to help drive business outcomes.
Wright brings more than 20 years of experience building high-performing marketing teams and programs that drive awareness, demand and revenue. Most recently, she served as the Chief Marketing Officer at Forj, where she successfully expanded the company’s market presence and elevated its brand authority. As the CMO and a member of the executive team at Cielo, Wright contributed to significant organizational growth, led a global rebranding effort, and integrated multiple acquisitions.
Wright started her career with Manpower, where she held multiple marketing and management leadership positions. Wright holds a bachelor’s degree in French and a master’s degree in international business from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.
39. Jen Davis
Company: OVHcloud
Title: Senior Director, Support & Business Accounts
Jen Davis began her professional career 16 years ago. Today, she is the Senior Director of Support and Business Accounts of OVHcloud, a global player and Europe's leading cloud provider operating more than 450,000 servers within 43 data centers across four continents. For more than 20 years, the group has relied on an integrated model that provides complete control of its value chain from the design of its servers to the construction and management of its data centers, including the orchestration of its fiber-optic network.
Davis is an experienced leader in global customer operations, specializing in customer experience. She has demonstrated expertise in business processes, customer and business acquisition, employee and customer transitions post-acquisition, new channel adoption, and leveraging customer feedback to drive business KPI improvements and revenue growth. Davis first got her start in 2009 as a Sales Support Consultant at GoDaddy, her most recent position prior to joining OVHcloud. Davis graduated from West Virginia University.
40. Dana Lawson
Company: Netlify
Title: Chief Technology Officer
Dana Lawson is the Chief Technology Officer at Netlify, where she leads the engineering, product, and design teams to innovate and deliver transformative digital experiences. With more than two decades of leadership at industry-leading companies including GitHub, Heptio, and New Relic, Lawson has a proven track record of scaling teams, fostering collaboration, and navigating complex technical landscapes.
Throughout her career, she’s worn many hats across the product lifecycle, showcasing her versatility and expertise building impactful technology solutions. Driven by a genuine passion for people, Lawson infuses her leadership with a blend of technical expertise and a spirit of fun, creating an inspiring and dynamic work environment.
41. Oana Jinga
Company: Dexory
Title: Chief Commercial and Product Officer & Co-Founder
Oana Jinga is the Chief Commercial and Product Officer and Co-Founder of Dexory, a highly innovative service robotics and AI company based in Central London. With a background in leading strategic partnerships at Google and developing innovative products at Telefonica, her career touched on various areas of the tech world, having found a sweet spot in designing, developing, and bringing robots to the logistics industry to drive significant business value across all warehouse processes. She is passionate about educating the world on the benefits and ethics of robotics as well as the importance of building unbiased AI.
42. Renuka Nadkarni
Company: Aryaka
Title: Chief Product Officer
Renuka Nadkarni is the Chief Product Officer of Aryaka. Aryaka is the leader in delivering Unified SASE as a Service, a fully integrated solution combining networking, security, and observability. Built for the demands of Generative AI as well as today’s multi-cloud hybrid world, Aryaka enables enterprises to transform their secure networking to deliver uncompromised performance, agility, simplicity, and security. Nadkarni is a security veteran with 20 years of experience building new business startups or new businesses at large, publicly traded companies.
Before joining Aryaka, Nadkarni held CTO, Security position at F5, where she was instrumental in driving F5’s foray into the security market. Previously, she has held various positions and built cutting-edge cloud and security products, launching new businesses at F5, VMware, and Infoblox. She holds a master's degree in electric engineering from the University of Houston and a bachelor’s degree in electric engineering from the University of Mumbai.
43. Madeline O'Phelan
Company: SpendHQ
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Madeline O'Phelan is a dynamic marketing leader with a passion for driving growth and innovation in high-growth, private equity-backed software companies. As Chief Marketing Officer at SpendHQ, she leads the company’s global marketing team, focusing on empowering procurement teams to confidently make decisions using a single source of truth for spend data, project tracking, and performance management.
With over 15 years of experience at the intersection of marketing, strategy, and technology, O'Phelan has built and led high-performing teams at Verity, Granicus, and Comcast. Her expertise lies in transforming data into actionable insights, crafting buyer-centric campaigns, and accelerating revenue growth through integrated marketing strategies. She began her career blending marketing communications with government affairs, a foundation that fuels her ability to navigate complex markets and drive impactful results. A firm believer in the power of data-driven storytelling, O'Phelan is committed to elevating brands, engaging customers, and shaping the future of marketing in the tech industry.
44. Allyson Barr
Company: ActiveState
Title: Chief Marketing Officer
Allyson Barr is passionate about the commercial operations of startup companies. She brings more than 20 years of experience in marketing, product management, sales development, and revenue operations at startups to her role in ActiveState. She has developed and rebooted B2B marketing practices at companies including Attivio (acquired by ServiceNow), Boxever (acquired by Sitecore), and LogMeIn (now GoTo). She most recently led the team responsible for the annual sales planning program at Amazon Web Services.
Barr holds a bachelor’s degree in English from Holy Cross and is a recent EMBA grad from University College Dublin.
45. Christina Augustine
Company: Bloomreach
Title: Chief Operating Officer
Christina Augustine serves as Chief Operating Officer, leading Bloomreach’s efforts to arm customers with the tools and knowledge they need to successfully compete in demanding markets. Bloomreach personalizes the ecommerce experience. Its data engine unifies real-time customer and product data.
Augustine is a leading thinker in e-commerce, having been a manager at Bain & Company focused on technology, retail, and strategy prior to joining Bloomreach in 2011. Augustine is an experienced computer programmer who has concentrated on site search, merchandising, and payments. She helped found ecommerce teams at both Hewlett Packard and Walmart. Augustine holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Saint Mary’s College and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
46. Jennifer Thronson
Company: AutoVitals
Title: Chief Operations Officer
Jennifer Thronson is the Chief Operating Officer at AutoVitals, where she oversees many of the company’s core operations and strategic initiatives. Prior to joining AutoVitals, Thronson served as CEO of BayIQ, successfully steering the company to its acquisition by AutoVitals. With extensive experience in building and leading technology companies, she has worked across sales, customer success, product development, and partnerships, focusing on scaling organizations and delivering impactful results.
47. Sue Watts
Company: Sapience Analytics
Title: President
Sue Watts is a dynamic leader, skilled in ITO, BPO, network/telephony, and app development. With diverse experience spanning the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Asia Pacific, she has excelled in roles across finance, business transformation, HR, and sales. In 2021, Watts joined the SaaS start-up Sapience Analytics as President, focusing on sharpening its market presence.
Previously, she held significant positions at Capgemini, initially as CEO of Americas Outsourcing and later as Executive Vice President, addressing challenges from acquisition integrations to pandemic responses. Watts also served as the COO of Business Process at Xerox, managing a vast $4.9B BPO portfolio. Her board membership at HCI Group, a Florida-based insurance company, underscores her business acumen.
Early roles at Orange and Unisys showcased her talent for transforming underperforming sectors into growth engines. She holds an MBA from the University of Notre Dame and a bachelor’s degree from Indiana University.
48. Celia Poon
Company: Eightfold
Title: Chief Financial Officer
Celia Poon began her professional career 31 years ago. Today, she is the Chief Financial Officer of Eightfold. Eightfold AI's market-leading Talent Intelligence Platform helps organizations retain top performers, upskill and reskill their workforce, recruit talent efficiently, and reach diversity goals. Poon is a finance executive with broad experience in strategic and financial planning, business development, mergers and acquisitions, capital markets, and knowledge in a variety of other functional areas (tax, accounting, real estate).
Poon got her start in 1994 as a Consultant at PwC. From there, she went on to JPMorgan H&Q, before eventually rising to CFO at Wag Labs, her most recent position prior to joining Eightfold. Poon graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business with an MBA and from UCLA with an undergraduate degree in economics.
49. Laura Paciano
Company: TestFit Inc.
Title: Senior Vice President Growth
Laura Paciano is the Senior Vice President of Growth at TestFit, a startup delivering generative design in the AECO space. TestFit has made a name for itself as the go-to for real estate feasibility, trusted by top developers including Prologis, innovative architects like Ware Malcomb, and leading brands like Home Depot.
Paciano has a long history leading go-to-market for category-defining tech companies. She played pivotal roles at both early stage startups Procore and Sonos to lead them through hyper-growth to eventual IPOs. Throughout her career, Paciano has led with empathy, growing not just the bottom line at the companies she works for, but also her team members’ skills and confidence.
50. Clarissa Cerda
Company: Pindrop
Title: Chief Legal Officer
Clarissa Cerda is the Chief Legal Officer of Pindrop. Pindrop’s solutions are leading the way to the future of voice by establishing the standard for identity, security, and trust for every voice interaction. Pindrop’s solutions protect some of the world’s biggest banks, insurers, and retailers using patented technology that extracts intelligence from every call and voice encountered.
Cerda is an experienced member of executive leadership teams and a key strategist for the development and implementation of multiple companies' corporate governance, data privacy and security, M&A, litigation strategy, and legal and regulatory compliance programs. She was a critical team member in taking LifeLock public in 2012.
Cerda brings more than 20 years of experience of strategic advising, negotiation, effective management, and lawyering in highly regulated, fast-paced, technology corporations, a leading law firm, and the White House. She provides the unique perspective of a business strategist who understands the complexity and value of technology and data intensive portfolios and the practical demands of exponential growth, while also appreciating the impact of risks inherent in an increasingly regulated environment.
Cerda graduated from the University of Michigan Law School with a JD in law, The University of Western Australia with a master’s degree and from Harvard University with an undergraduate degree in American government and political philosophy.
