— Smartsheet’s C-suite shuffle continues with the hiring of Scott Torrey as chief revenue officer.
Torrey previously led salary data company Payscale as CEO from 2019 to 2021. He spent the past three years as executive chairman at finance software startup Tesorio, and was at Concur for nearly two decades, including six years as chief revenue officer.
His new role marks a reunion of sorts as he teams up again with Concur co-founder Rajeev Singh, who recently became CEO at Smartsheet.
“Smartsheet is on a growth trajectory, and Scott’s leadership will drive our go-to-market success,” Singh said in a press release.
Smartsheet earlier this year hired Pratima Arora as its chief product officer and Ravi Soin as chief information security officer. It also named Cynthia Tee as chief technology officer.
Founded two decades ago, Smartsheet is one of the Seattle region’s iconic tech companies, with a large customer base of major businesses and more than $1 billion in annual revenue. It went private earlier this year in a $8.4 billion deal with Vista Equity Partners and Blackstone.
Speaking to the company’s annual Engage conference in Seattle last month, Singh said it’s time for Smartsheet to “step out of the shadows” and challenge old perceptions of Smartsheet as simply an online spreadsheet tool. The company recently announced new features as part of its “Intelligent Work Management” platform that combines AI agents, knowledge graphs, and automation.
— Amar Subramanya, a top AI researcher who joined Microsoft in July as a corporate VP, is changing jobs again and joining Apple as vice president of AI.
Subramanya will report to Craig Federighi, Apple’s vice president of software engineering, the tech giant announced Monday. He’ll lead Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation.
Apple also announced that John Giannandrea, Apple’s senior vice president for Machine Learning and AI Strategy, is stepping down.
Before joining Microsoft, Subramanya was at Google for more than 16 years, where he helped lead work on Gemini. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Washington in 2009 and was a visiting researcher at Microsoft for a year in the mid-2000s.
“AI has long been central to Apple’s strategy, and we are pleased to welcome Amar to Craig’s leadership team and to bring his extraordinary AI expertise to Apple,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a press release.
Apple has struggled to catch up with competitors in the AI race and recently delayed a new version of its Siri voice assistant.
— Torben Severson left Amazon after 17 years to take a new role as vice president and head of global business development at OpenAI. Severson held multiple business development leadership roles, most recently as chief of staff to Doug Herrington, CEO of Worldwide Amazon Stores.
“Joining OpenAI at such a defining moment in technology is an opportunity I couldn’t pass up,” Severson said in a LinkedIn post. “I’m drawn to moments of transformation — and it’s rare to be part of something so squarely at the frontier of what’s possible.”
Severson said he was the first person to join “what became Corporate Business Development” at Amazon in 2008. “I’m deeply grateful for the people I’ve learned from and worked alongside,” he wrote. “Amazon shaped how I think, taught me how to navigate complex problems, and gave me the opportunity to build and lead exceptional teams. Through those experiences I learned the value of high judgment, clarity in ambiguity, and building trust through curiosity and rigor.”
OpenAI, based in San Francisco, said last year that it opened an office in Bellevue, Wash. The company recently acquired Bellevue-based startup Statsig.
