The fast-growing AI startup DataRobot is naming tech veteran Damon Fletcher as its CFO on Tuesday.
The hire comes two months after DataRobot promoted COO Dan Wright to the role of CEO.
Fletcher and Wright say fresh leadership helps the fast-growing startup prepare for an IPO.
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The $2.8 billion artificial-intelligence startup DataRobot is announcing the hiring of a veteran chief financial officer on Tuesday, two months after naming a new CEO.
The new top leadership gives the Boston startup a fresh perspective and flexibility as it approaches a public offering, the executives said.
“There are some transitions happening, and that’s part of what drew me to this,” said Damon Fletcher, the new chief financial officer and a 20-year tech-industry veteran who most recently worked at the data-visualization company Tableau. “It’s a great opportunity for us to come in at the same time.”
Dan Wright was named CEO in March after joining the company as its chief operating officer last year. Wright succeeded cofounder Jeremy Achin, who announced he was stepping down in March to work on pandemic prevention and national security projects in Washington, DC. In stepping down, Achin said he recruited Wright “with the goal of eventually having him take over running the company for me.”
The changes come as DataRobot, which makes software kits for companies to build AI applications, grows rapidly. The 9-year-old company of about 1,000 employees reported an annual recurring revenue rate of $150 million. It has raised $750.6 million, the latest round being a $320 million Series F in 2020 led by Altimeter Capital, with new investors including Snowflake Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
The partnership with Snowflake — which had a huge initial public offering last year but has since hit market turbulence — is significant because Snowflake’s data-storage business connects with DataRobot’s AI products that help process that data. “That partnership continues to go extremely well,” Wright said.
A startup often hires a chief financial officer with ample experience in the run-up to an IPO. As the chief financial officer of Tableau, Fletcher helped lead that company’s 2019 acquisition by Salesforce for $15.7 billion in stock.
Wright said there was no timeline for the company to go public but added: “We are doing all of the things to get the company ready to take that step.”
The CEO said he believed new top leadership was an advantage because AI is “a very dynamic market, and really important for us to maintain flexibility in our thinking.”
The company launched new enterprise AI products at a company conference and acquired the Silicon Valley data-science startup Zepl earlier this month.
“We feel that we can continue explosive growth,” Wright said, “and become an iconic company.”