— Peter Horadan, a seasoned Seattle tech executive who was an executive at Avalara and later founded an accounting software startup called Lockstep, joined identity verification startup Vouched as its new CEO.
Horadan spent the past two years at The Sage Group, which acquired Lockstep in 2022. He was previously executive vice president of engineering and CTO at tax software giant Avalara, and also led teams at Microsoft and Concur.
Founded in 2018, Vouched helps companies verify the identity of customers and users by examining driver’s licenses and other forms of identification. It can provide fraud detection of a person in real-time.
Horadan said he’s spent his career solving problems by automating manual business processes, from recording travel expenses to filing taxes.
“In each case, solving that problem led to a ton of value for everyone — customers, employees, investors,” he told GeekWire.
Horadan hopes to create value for Vouched customers from banking, healthcare, and other industries that require identity verification processes.
He said the proliferation of deepfakes and other AI-produced content will make identification a more pressing problem for companies.
“If you’re a company and you need to try to figure out who you’re dealing with online, how do you do that at scale?” Horadan said. “It’s a really interesting technology problem.”
Vouched CEO and co-founder John Baird will become chairman of the board and transition to a role as chief strategy officer.
Vouched, which spun out of Madrona Venture Labs, employs 25 people and has raised $18 million to date, including a $6.3 million round last year. The company is ranked No. 132 on the GeekWire 200, our list of top Pacific Northwest tech startups.
Other key personnel changes across the Pacific Northwest tech ecosystem:
— Dhaval Patel joined Sana Biotechnology as executive vice president and chief scientific officer.
Patel was most recently held the same roles at UCB, a Brussels-based pharma giant. He also spent a decade at Novartis, and held leadership positions at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and Duke University.
Sana recently opened a new manufacturing facility near Seattle. The company, which went public in 2021, has four drugs in human testing: two for cancer, one for autoimmune disease and another for type 1 diabetes.
— Aaron Bilyeu joined Cloverleaf Infrastructure as its chief development officer. Bilyeu previously worked for Meta as the senior director of site development for its data centers worldwide.
Cloverleaf, which has offices in Seattle and Houston, helps facilitate the construction of new clean energy facilities that power data centers and other large electricity consumers.
— Heather Rosentrater was appointed as CEO of Avista Corp., the publicly traded energy giant based in Spokane, Wash., effective Jan. 1.
Rosentrater joined Avista in 1996 as a student engineering technician and was most recently president and chief operating officer. She’ll replace longtime Avista exec Dennis Vermillion, who is retiring from the company. Rosentrater will also join the company’s board.
“My family’s history in the area extends back to the founding of Avista, what was then called Washington Water Power, and the Spokane Falls has been the backdrop of my career,” Rosentrater said in a statement. “Having grown up in the area, including attending Gonzaga University, I am extremely honored to help continue Avista’s long-standing legacy of supporting community vitality through energy.”
Avista provides electric service to 418,000 customers and natural gas to 382,000 customers across the Pacific Northwest.
— Brady Paron joined Seattle-based startup Mast Reforestation as director of carbon market partnership. Paron previously spent more than eight years at Shopify, where he held roles including senior lead for sustainability programs, head of community relations and head of social impact.
Founded in 2016 and previously known as DroneSeed, Mast Reforestation restores forests scorched by wildfires and is the biggest seed supplier in the western U.S.
https://ift.tt/GZb4uKL August 27, 2024 at 01:00PM GeekWire
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