WEKA Appoints Software Industry Veteran Hoang Vuong as Chief Financial Officer

WEKA.IO, Inc. announced that Hoang Vuong has joined as CFO. Reporting to Liran Zvibel, Weka cofounder and CEO, Vuong will be responsible for all aspects of the company’s financial strategy and operations as it continues to scale amid explosive growth.

Vuong joins on the heels of a record-breaking year for WEKA. The company exceeded over $100 million in annual recurring revenue and grew to more than 500 employees globally, as five of its customers expanded their AI and HPC clusters to over an EB of data under management running on the Weka Data Platform. In May 2024, Weka closed a $140 million Series E funding round led by Valor Equity Partners at a $1.6 billion valuation, cementing its unicorn status.

“We are ecstatic to welcome Hoang Vuong as WEKA’s new chief financial officer,” said Zvibel. “2024 was a banner year for WEKA, as we achieved several major financial milestones and added many of the world’s leading AI and HPC innovators to our customer base. Hoang’s track record of driving growth and public company experience will help accelerate our momentum.”

A seasoned technology executive, Vuong served as CFO at Amplitude Inc. from 2019 to 2023, helping to take the company public in September 2021. Before that, he was the chief operating officer and CFO of GoFundMe. He also held various leadership positions at Intuit, Demandforce, and Deloitte. He currently serves on the board of the software company Revinate, Inc.

“Weka is leading the way in AI and GPU acceleration and is well positioned to ride the AI infrastructure wave,” said Vuong. “I’m beyond excited to join WEKA’s talented team and seize the opportunity ahead of us.”

Comments

This news invited us to check the leadership page and we discovered that a few key roles have been eliminated, we think it's more a replacement of people than a removal of the different positions. Three key people are concerned here:

Intekhab Nazeer, CFO,

Jeffrey Giannetti, CRO,

and Jonathan Martin, President.

Their respective LinkedIn page, at the time we write this comment, still shows WEKA as a current experience. It's a surprise we saw Gianetti and Martin just a few weeks ago at SC24 where WEKA had a splash. So we don't know the reason behind, probably cooking something but for sure it will be a new era.

Almost at the same time, the company has recruited its first CMO, Lauren Vaccarello, arrived in October, who never worked in the data storage industry.

What is sure is WEKA belongs now to the Centaur group following their unicorn status obtained during last round that invited them to join the Coldago Research Storage Unicorn club. A new report, the 16th edition, is coming in a few days.