AUSTIN, Texas, Oct. 25, 2022 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- data.world, the enterprise data catalog for the modern data stack, today announced new leaders and enhanced solutions to keep pace with growing demand in the U.S. and Europe. The company named Stephanie McReynolds as chief marketing officer, Richard Yonkers as senior vice president of sales, and Mineo Sakan as vice president of finance. The appointments follow the company’s recent $50 million Series C funding round led by Goldman Sachs Asset Management and recognition as a leader in the Forrester Wave™ Enterprise Data Catalogs for DataOps, Q2 2022. The new team members will accelerate the delivery of data.world’s core go-to-market solutions and expand its client base.
“Stephanie, Richard, and Mineo bring deep expertise in scaling SaaS organizations and driving revenue growth on a global scale,” said Brett Hurt, CEO and co-founder of data.world. “A strong team sets the foundation for a great culture and the ability to rapidly scale, and I couldn’t be more proud that such incredibly talented people are joining data.world. We’re thrilled for this next phase of the company as we go from a data catalog category leader to an essential platform for knowledge discovery, access, sharing, and governance.”
New go-to-market leaders
Stephanie McReynolds has more than ten years of experience building marketing teams at SaaS start-ups and over 20 years of experience in marketing and product roles at data and analytics companies. She most recently served as head of marketing at Ambienti.ai, launching its AI-based solution for improved physical security team operations. Prior to Ambient.ai, McReynolds was the senior vice president of marketing at Alation, a pioneer in data cataloging. As its first marketing executive, she built the marketing and sales development team to support rapid growth in customer adoption. McReynolds was responsible for the creation of the data catalog market category. She has also held senior marketing roles at Trifacta, ClearStory Data, and Aster Data.
In 2019, McReynolds co-authored an academic study on the productivity impact of data catalogs, published through Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. She earned her bachelor’s degree, as well as a master’s in International Policy Studies with a focus on international business, from Stanford University.
“As an advisor for data.world, I've seen its rapid growth in verticals from insurance to local government, and I'm thrilled to join the company full-time as chief marketing officer to build on that momentum,” said McReynolds. “Enterprises are looking for a cloud-native data catalog they can use to leverage their data to make critical business decisions, especially in uncertain economic times. I look forward to working with the incredible team here as we bring solutions like data discovery, agile data governance, and cloud migration to data practitioners worldwide.”
Richard Yonkers joined data.world last quarter. In his role, he has grown the sales team and been instrumental in bringing data.world solutions to market. Prior to joining data.world, Yonkers served as senior vice president of sales at Knoema, an enterprise data hub provider. He was also the global sales leader for 1010data’s Platform & Solutions team, helping to shape the company’s vision, strategic plan, sales strategy, and product roadmap, resulting in significant net revenue growth during his tenure. Yonkers received his bachelor’s degree in Business Administration from the State University of New York and is a graduate of the Harvard Executive Leadership program.
Mineo Sakan is the former vice president of global finance at HYCU—the fastest-growing leader in the multi-cloud data protection as a service industry—where he scaled the finance and accounting organizations to support the company's hyper growth and rapidly expanding global operations. Prior to HYCU, Sakan was vice president of go-to-market and strategic finance at Nutanix—an enterprise cloud computing company and one of the first to be labeled a “unicorn start-up.” Sakan helped build out the FP&A organization while guiding the company through its IPO and subsequent journey to $1B+ of revenue. He received his bachelor’s degree from Babson College and an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.
New Solutions and European Expansion
data.world is expanding its support for data-driven business initiatives with its solutions: data discovery, agile data governance, data cloud migration, data mesh, dataops, and semantic layer. These solutions are available today and map directly to data.world’s most commonly deployed use cases. The solutions leverage the power of the platform’s knowledge graph foundation and combine innovative governance and catalog capabilities with implementation services and customer success.
Over the last year, data.world has grown its business in Europe by 75 percent, including new and expansion business with companies including OneWeb, Penguin Random House UK, Vopak, and WPP.
“data.world has been an amazing partner for us as we establish an agile data governance program to help us manage our data,” said Rupal Sumaria, head of Data Governance for Penguin Random House UK, one of the world's largest book publishers. “Imagine managing books without title information, author data, cover images, royalties, or number of chapters. That's what it's like managing data without a catalog. Now, information that once took our data scientists a week to find is discoverable in seconds on data.world.”
