— Bellevue, Wash.-based identify authentication software company Auth0 named former Glassdoor CTO Bhawna Singh as SVP of engineering. She will be responsible for Auth0’s various platforms and oversee the software engineering, data and machine learning teams.
Based in San Francisco, Singh spent more than five years at Glassdoor and previously was a senior director of search intelligence at Ask.com.
Auth0 was acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion earlier this year. Following the acquisition, Auth0’s identify platform is now a product unit within publicly traded Okta.
— The Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence (AI2) promoted University of Washington computer science professor Daniel Weld to general manager and chief scientist of its Semantic Scholar project.
A noted AI researcher, Weld is also a venture partner at Madrona Venture Group. He will join AI2 full-time and become an emeritus professor at UW.
Weld succeeds Doug Raymond, a former Amazon Alexa product lead, the project’s general manager since 2018. Semantic Scholar is a publicly available AI-based search engine for navigating academic research. It currently has 8 million monthly active users.
As part of the transition, Northwestern University Professor Doug Downey will succeed Weld as head of the Semantic Scholar Research organization. Additionally, Microsoft alum Alex Wade has joined AI2 from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and is now director of strategic partnerships.
— Seattle real estate startup Flyhomes hired Kayti Sullivan as the company’s first chief revenue officer. She was most recently CRO at The RealReal, a luxury online consignment marketplace and served as an advisor to FlyHomes since the beginning of the year.
Sullivan previously spent more than 12 years at Yelp, most recently as SVP and general manager of its local revenue business. She also co-founded Molly Jones, a female-focused cannabis consultation service.
Flyhomes closed a $150 million Series C investment round in June and currently operates in markets in Washington, Oregon, California, Texas and Massachusetts.
—Alline Akintore has joined Oregon Venture Fund as principal. She was most recently a venture fellow at female-focused venture fund January Ventures.
Akintore received her MBA from Stanford last year and previously was COO of RwandaOnline.
Founded by Eric Rosenfeld in 2007, Oregon Venture Fund focuses on startups in Oregon and southwest Washington. Its portfolio includes BrandLive, Hubb, Rigado, Bright.md among others. The fund was also an early investor in Absci, which went public earlier this year.
— Former Foursquare SVP of Engineering Jeremy Tryba has joined Madrona Venture Labs as a technical partner. Tryba was a longtime engineering leader at Placed, a Seattle startup acquired by Snap and later sold to Foursquare.
The Seattle startup studio also announced a new technical advisory board including FreightWeb co-founder Farah Ali, Zeitworks CEO Jay Bartot and UW Assistant Professor Kurtis Heimerl.
Earlier this year, Madrona Venture Labs raised $8 million for its fourth fund and unveiled a new model that turns its investors into co-founders, board members and advisors of its startup spinout.
