Snorkel AI is building upon its latest phase of rapid growth with four major c-suite appointments. Collectively, these executives are AI pioneers and experts in global scale, with previous exits ranging from acquisitions by Google and Microsoft to IPO. Now, they'll guide Snorkel as it cements itself as a foundational piece of the AI infrastructure stack.
The new executives include:
- Ronaldo Ama, Chief Development Officer, is a world-class engineering leader who, as Vice President of Engineering at Looker, helped lead the product and the company through its acquisition by Google. He served as GM of Looker at Google for nearly four years, and currently serves as an advisor and board member to various companies including Conclude, Hex and Yalo. His experience also includes leadership roles at Domino Data, Ayasdi and VMware.
- Cate Lochead, Chief Marketing Officer, is a go-to-market expert with a track record for maturing growth companies through global scale. She previously built the marketing team at JumpCloud and supported funding rounds of more than $300 million in capital across Series E and F. Prior to JumpCloud, Cate served as CMO of DataStax and SVP of Marketing at Carbon Black, where she led product and corporate marketing through the IPO. She is a member of the Forbes Business Development Council and b2b SaaS network Pavilion (fka Revenue Collective).
- Bobby Shoker, Chief Financial Officer, brings 25+ years of experience as a finance and operations leader to the Snorkel team. He previously served as the CFO at Fungible, leading the company through its acquisition by Microsoft. Prior to Fungible, he spent six-plus years as Vice President of Finance and Accounting at Netskope. Bobby has a track record of helping companies raise capital, grow, scale efficiently and create significant shareholder value. As a finance leader, he has helped companies accelerate growth and profitability, and successfully completed three strategic sales and one IPO.
- Ajay Singh, Chief Product Officer, is a pioneering entrepreneur in the machine learning (ML) and large language model (LLM) space, having co-founded Zebrium and serving as its CEO for four-plus years through its acquisition by ScienceLogic. In that span, Zebrium built the most accurate unsupervised ML engine to identify root causes of software problems, and pioneered the use of Generative AI long before it became mainstream. Prior to Zebrium, Ajay led Product at Nimble Storage and for multiple product lines at NetApp.
The four new executives join as Snorkel's growth accelerates driven by enterprises' need to develop the data that feeds Generative AI applications. Enterprises face challenges in harnessing the full potential of their data, with roughly 70 - 80% of AI data development work done manually. Snorkel provides a platform for programmatic data development that has saved enterprises billions of dollars and years of manpower, while growing topline revenue. Snorkel's customer list has expanded with globally recognized names from a variety of industry leaders including BNY Mellon, Comcast, Flipkart, Linktree, QBE Insurance, Wayfair and Wells Fargo.
"The GenAI explosion has led every enterprise on the planet to look into training large language models (LLMs). These companies are quickly realizing that there's a major difference between flashy chatbot and actual, production-quality AI. They need tools and guidance, and we're here to provide exactly that," said Alex Ratner, CEO and co-founder of Snorkel AI. "We're powering programmatic data development for the biggest companies in the world--whether it's a hospital saving lives, or a bank empowering people to build their passions--we can speed up their innovations by 100x. That success is why we're attracting incredible talent like Ajay, Bobby, Cate and Ronaldo."
Introducing SnorkelCon
In response to the acceleration of enterprise AI initiatives, Snorkel is introducing a new industry event: SnorkelCon. The first conference will take place October 16th - 17th, 2024 in New York City. The event will bring together AI experts, data scientists from the world's leading institutions, and innovative adopters at the forefront of AI.
In April 2024, Snorkel released a major product update focused on upleveling programmatic data development for enterprises, with a focus on foundation model integrations with direct access to Google Gemini models and integration with Databricks for unified model governance; computer vision capabilities; and enhanced document intelligence. It also launched Snorkel Custom, a new services and platform that helps enterprises use their data to adapt Large Language Models (LLMs) and quickly deliver production-quality AI, at Google Cloud Next '24.