Rubikloud has announced an expansion of its leadership team as the company eyes the lofty goal of building a billion-dollar business.
Joining the team are Samir Ahuja as COO, Donna de Winter as CFO, and Kate Railton as VP of people. Waleed Ayoub, formerly the company’s chief product officer, is moving to the CTO role.
The new execs hail from multiple Canadian tech giants, with several decades of experience between them in scaling teams and products. Ahuja, who will lead Rubikloud’s global sales starting in August, was SVP of sales at QuickPlay Media. de Winter was most recently CFO at Vision Critical, and led Varicent through its acquisition to IBM. Railton began her tech career at Achievers, and was part of the People team at BlueCat as it scaled to over 400 people.
“We’re on track to continue growing revenue and customers by over 100 percent year-over-year.”
– Kerry Liu, CEO of Rubikloud
“You don’t build a management team for the challenges of today. You build one that will hopefully help the company reach its ambitions of tomorrow,” said Liu. “For us, this means building a management team that will help us scale to the first $1 billion AI product company in Canada. With a combination of promoting talent from within and bringing in industry veterans who are an excellent cultural fit, I couldn’t be happier with this diverse and amazing team.”
The company has also expanded its sales and client teams in the UK, Ireland, Texas, and Hong Kong. At the time of its $46 million Series B led by Intel in January 2018, Liu said that the company had “more committed customers than we can deploy,” with a large part of that group being located in Europe and Asia. Following its Series B, it announced a full partnership with Intel to integrate new tech into the company’s platform.
Rubikloud’s core product migrates data from retailers’ old legacy infrastructure onto the cloud, and automates decision-making on loyalty marketing and mass promotional planning. Through the Intel partnership, Rubikloud is looking at improving the actual store operation experience, such as helping them avoid overstocking and stock outs.
“We’re on track to continue growing revenue and customers by over 100 percent year-over-year,” Liu told BetaKit. “The market is literally perfect for vertical-specific AI in retail. Retailers are finally fully awake to the notion they have to deploy AI into their core systems to evolve.”
As the company surpasses 110 people, Liu is keen to reiterate his desire to build the next Canadian enterprise SaaS leader. Citing companies like QuickPlay Media and D2L as examples, Liu told BetaKit at the time of its Series B that he thinks Canada has a chance to lead in this area particularly.
“We’ve never had a Facebook in Canada; we’ve never had a pure-play consumer rocketship. Shopify is still a B2B business. But enterprise software, we’ve had two dozen just in Ontario alone in the last 10 years,” Liu said.
Feature photo by Andrew Williamson.