WEKA has appointed new chief revenue, product, and strategy officers.
The company supplies high-performance, parallel access file system software for enterprise and HPC, with AI and agentic AI workloads now a major focus. It lost senior execs in December 2024, when president Jonathan Martin, CFO Intekhab Nazeer, and CRO Jeffrey Gianetti left. Hoang Vuong became the new CFO that same month. WEKA then laid off some employees – sources estimated around 50 – as it said it was restructuring for the AI era, having 75 open positions at the time.
Now WEKA has hired Brian Froehling as chief revenue officer, Ajay Singh as chief product officer, and reassigned Nilesh Patel, prior CPO, to chief strategy officer and GM of Alliances and Corporate Development.
CEO and co-founder Liran Zvibel stated: “WEKA is operating at the forefront of the AI revolution … Ajay, Brian, and Nilesh each bring deep domain expertise and seasoned leadership experience that will be instrumental in accelerating our global sales execution, scaling go-to-market strategies with our strategic partners, and advancing product development to provide the foundational infrastructure needed to power the agentic AI era into WEKA’s next growth phase – and beyond.”
Froehling was most recently CRO at cloud-native logging and security analytics company Devo Technology, responsible for sales, customer success, training, and operations. Before that, he served as EVP of global sales at video cloud services supplier Brightcove, driving $220 million in revenue. He also held senior sales leadership roles at CA Technologies and Pivotal Software, where he helped scale go-to-market teams and played a role in Pivotal’s IPO.
Froehling said: “This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to empower AI-driven organizations with market-leading solutions.”
Singh comes from being Snorkel AI’s CPO. Snorkel’s product tech focuses on accelerating the development of AI and ML apps by automating and streamlining data labeling and curation to build AI training datasets faster. He was also CEO and co-founder of Zebrium, which developed software using ML and generative AI to analyze software logs for the root cause of outages. Zebrium was acquired by ScienceLogic in April 2024. Before that, he was Head of Product at Nimble Storage, leading from concept through its IPO and eventual acquisition by HPE, and a product management director at NetApp.
Singh said: “WEKA has been trailblazing in AI data infrastructure innovation with the ultra-powerful WEKA Data Platform, which dramatically speeds model training and inference by orders of magnitude.”
Patel’s lateral move indicates that alliances and partnerships are going to play an important role at WEKA. He said: “We’re at a pivotal moment in the evolution of AI, and WEKA is powering many of the world’s largest AI deployments to supercharge innovation. This is an incredible opportunity to shape WEKA’s path forward and work closely with key partners that will help us scale AI solutions and fuel sustained hypergrowth.”
Possible partnership and alliance opportunities exist in the AI large language model, retrieval-augmented generation, vector database, and AI data pipeline areas.
Several other storage suppliers are intensely focused on storing and supplying data for AI training and inference workloads, including DDN, Pure Storage, VAST Data, and NetApp, which is developing an AI-focused ONTAP variant. Dell, which has a strong AI focus for its servers, has said it is parallelizing PowerScale. WEKA has to show that its customers can develop and run AI applications faster and better by using WEKA’s software over alternatives.
Another recent WEKA exec-level change was Sean Hiss, VP of GTM Operations and chief of staff to the CEO, who resigned in February, having joined WEKA in October 2021 from Hitachi Vantara.
