— Munil Shah, a former engineering leader at UiPath who previously spent 23 years at Microsoft, has joined San Francisco startup Talkdesk as chief technology officer.
Shah, based in Seattle, was most recently a CTO at UiPath, the robotic process automation software giant. He joined UiPath in 2018 after a long stint at Microsoft, where he held various engineering leadership roles.
Founded in 2011, Talkdesk sells software built for customer service contact centers. The company raised a $230 million Series D round in 2021, but has had multiple rounds of layoffs since then.
“There is a massive shift underway in the software industry with the launch of ChatGPT and GenAI, and the contact center is being impacted tremendously,” Shah said in a statement. “This is a pivotal moment for Talkdesk as the market for conversational AI and virtual agents is expected to grow rapidly.”
— Ajay Nair, a longtime engineering leader at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, joined search technology giant Elastic as a group vice president.
Nair previously spent a decade at AWS, where he led large teams working on various cloud products. Before that, he was a manager at Microsoft, leading Bing teams.
San Francisco-based Elastic went public in 2018. It reported revenue of $328 million, up 19% year-over-year, in its most recent quarter.
— Libretto, a LLM startup led by former employees at Seattle real estate giant Redfin, this week came out of stealth and announced a $3.7 million investment round.
Former Redfin CTO Sasha Aickin is CEO of the company, which aims to help customers improve prompt engineering.
The company’s Seattle-based employees include April Alexander, a former director at Redfin who most recently was at Outreach as a head of product; and Mahalie Stackpole, a former lead product designer at Redfin who was also at Outreach.
Jamie DeMichele, who spent more than 17 years at Redfin as an engineering leader, is an engineer at Libretto.
— Kareem Choudhry, a longtime Xbox exec, is leaving Microsoft, according to a report from Windows Central. Choudry spent more than 26 years at the Redmond tech giant, leading various video game-related initiatives, including Xbox Cloud Gaming. It’s the latest shakeup at Xbox, The Verge noted.
