Tech Moves: Smartsheet adds to C-suite; Armoire gets ML lead; past Microsoft director launches startup

Enterprise software giant Smartsheet on Thursday announced four C-suite changes — two hires and two promotions. The Bellevue, Wash., company, which is best known for helping businesses organize and track work, has undergone two rounds of layoffs in the past six months and appointed Rajeev Singh as CEO in October.

“I came to Smartsheet because I believed in the opportunity. We are assembling an incredible team ready to seize that opportunity,” Singh said a LinkedIn post sharing the changes.

The moves continue a pattern of Singh recruiting from his past, as all four have prior ties to the CEO.

• Robson Grieve joins as chief marketing officer, coming from San Francisco-based software company Motive. Grieve previously worked in the Seattle area at Concur Technologies, where he overlapped with Singh, who was Concur’s co-founder, president and chief operating officer.

• Toyan Espeut is Smartsheet’s new chief customer officer. Espeut spent more than 11 years at Apptio, a Seattle-area enterprise software firm, where she most recently served as executive vice president of sales for the Americas and previously held the title of chief customer officer. Singh is a past Apptio board member.

• Pratima Arora is now chief product and technology officer, adding technology to her purview after less than a year as Smartsheet’s CPO. Her past roles include leadership positions for companies including Chainalysis, Atlassian, Salesforce and Concur.

• Kelsi McDonald Harris has been promoted to chief business officer, after serving as senior VP of business operations and Singh’s chief of staff. Her prior role was chief people officer at Accolade, a company Singh previously led.

— Armoire named Morgan Cundiff as head of product and machine learning for the Seattle-based fashion rental startup.

Cundiff joins from LTK, a shopping app and platform where online creators share product and lifestyle picks that help people decide what to buy. She was at the startup for nearly four years, building and scaling LTK’s data science and machine learning capabilities. She previously worked at the e-commerce tech company ShopRunner, which was acquired by FedEx.

Armoire is ranked No. 40 on the GeekWire 200, an index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups.

— Longtime tech leader and entrepreneur Javier Páramo has launched AIQLinea, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup helping companies navigate the rapid adoption of new AI technologies.

“We help enterprise leaders turn fragmented AI experimentation into clarity, aligned strategy, governed execution, and decision-ready roadmaps,” Páramo said on LinkedIn.

Páramo spent nearly two decades at Microsoft, departing in 2010 as senior director of worldwide field strategy, where he focused on education products. He later served as executive director of information services strategy at the Providence healthcare system before founding AIQLinea.

— Jake Silsby has joined Seattle’s Tin Can as head of industrial design. The startup is selling landline-style, Wi-Fi-enabled telephone for kids and in December raised $12 million from investors. Silsby was previously an industrial design manager for the business consulting company tms and has worked for Rad Power Bikes and Starbucks.

“I had the opportunity to freelance with the team on their flagship phone, and I’m looking forward to helping shape what’s next for this small but mighty brand,” Silsby said on LinkedIn.

Since launching its flagship product earlier this year, Tin Can quickly went “viral,” sold out its first two production runs and built a near-six-figure waitlist.

— Washington Roundtable, a business advocacy organization, appointed two new board members:

• Dr. Christopher Longhurst, who was named CEO of Seattle Children’s in January
• Dominic Carr, executive VP and chief communications and corporate affairs officer at Starbucks and a longtime past leader at Microsoft

— Ian Haydon is leaving his role as director of communications and AI policy for the University of Washington Institute for Protein Design. Haydon joined IPD in 2012 as a graduate student in the lab of David Baker, who would later win the Nobel Prize.

In a LinkedIn post announcing his departure, Haydon called his job “an honor.”

“The protein design methods that I learned as a grad student became obsolete once new deep learning tools emerged,” he added. “Watching the field reinvent itself — and seeing seemingly distant ideas become doable and then done — has been astonishing.” Haydon did not disclose his next move.

— Jonathan Hunt has left Microsoft as a corporate VP in AI business solutions to join Anthropic as global head of commercial operations and strategy. He is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and past employers include Databricks and Salesforce.

— Cotiviti, the parent company of Bellevue, Wash.-based health software company Edifecs, named Ric Sinclair as CEO. The Utah-based healthcare giant acquired Edifecs last year.

— Pacific Northwest National Laboratory computational scientist and biological physicist Margaret Cheung was named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world’s largest multidisciplinary scientific society.