— Karat, a Seattle-based startup that helps companies conduct technical interviews, hired two new executives.
- Scott Bonneau, a former vice president at Indeed, joins as executive vice president of operations and product.
- Amy Sennett, previously general counsel at OpenText and Catalant Technologies, joins as Karat’s new general counsel.
Karat raised a $110 million Series C round at a $1.1 billion valuation in October 2021. Its software is used by tech companies such as Compass, Intuit, Indeed, Ford and others that need help interviewing engineers.
— Common Room, a Seattle startup that aims to help companies deepen relationships with their users and customers, hired Matt Duchesne as vice president of sales.
Duchesne previously held the same role at Cyberhaven, a Silicon Valley cybersecurity firm. He also worked at VMware and Avi Networks.
Common Room launched in 2020 and raised $52 million last year. The company won Startup of the Year honors at this year’s Startup Awards.
— Peter Petesch, a longtime Microsoft engineering leader, departed after more than 32 years at the Redmond tech giant.
Petesch joined the company in 1990 as a senior systems engineer following a stint with IBM. He spent the past 11 years as a principal program manager lead for Microsoft Azure.
“A career at Microsoft has been one of the most gratifying and challenging experiences in my life,” Petesch wrote on LinkedIn. “Each of these waves of technology and value delivered to the world were deeply meaningful and I’m incredibly fortunate to have witnessed these evolutions firsthand.”
Petesch left Microsoft in November and is moving on to “my next adventure.”
— Skytap, a Seattle startup that helps companies migrate to the cloud, hired Rahul Tripathi as chief product and technology officer. Tripathi previously was CTO at Nutanix, and a vice president at Hewlett Packard Enterprise.
— Aduro, a Seattle-area corporate wellness software company, hired Amanda Conway as chief growth officer. She previously was an executive at Talkspace, Healthie, and CoachCare.
— Rebrandly, a San Francisco branded link management startup, hired longtime Seattle-based marketing leader Kevin Shively as senior vice president of marketing. Shively was previously vice president of marketing at Seattle startup Ally, which was acquired by Microsoft, and held similar roles at Tagboard and Simply Measured.
— Washington Research Foundation announced its sixth annual cohort of WRF postdoctoral fellows. WRF will support 12 researchers for three years at Benaroya Research Institute, Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, University of Washington and Washington State University.
— Inmedix, a Seattle health tech company that aims to bolster autoimmune disease therapies, added renowned scientist Leroy Hood to its board of directors. Hood co-founded the Institute for Systems Biology and was a recipient of the National Medal of Science in 2011.