RAVEL Inc. has announced the appointment of three new senior leaders to strengthen the leadership team. The company, which rebranded from StratusCore in April 2023, has added Philippa Carroll as Chief Product Officer, Kaveh Gourdarzian as VP of Product and Engineering and Chad Knowles as Chief Revenue Officer.
It brings an experienced team together that, alongside co founders Denise Muyco, CEO and David D’Andrea, Chief Architect, will help to expand its market share and expand the customer footprint. To include larger enterprises with more complex needs in sectors such as oil, gas and energy, computer technology, and healthcare.
Founded more than ten years ago, RAVEL developed the first virtual studio for remote and hybrid digital media teams and organizations. It provides access to remote compute, software, and rendering power for creative teams. Key to its future growth is RAVEL Orchestrate. This is a no-code orchestration software that enables complete control over the rapid assembly of infrastructure (both cloud and cloud regions and on-premise equipment), virtualization technologies, and identity management systems. With the capability for quick and frequent software image deployment for creation environments in the M&E, AEC and PD&M industries.
Denise Muyco, CEO of RAVEL, commented, “Not only have I known each of these talented executives for ten-plus years, but I know what each of them is capable of and how they will rapidly accelerate this business to meet the demands of our much-needed orchestration software. While they bring vast operational and managerial experience to our staff from every size of organization, they are also entrepreneurs at heart. Who are unafraid of rolling up their sleeves and delivering creative new ways to overcome challenges. It’s a thrill to be working alongside every one of them.”
Who is Philippa Carroll
Carrol was appointed to the position in May, having worked as a contractor at RAVEL from February 2024. She was previously Chief Sales & Marketing Officer at Glassbox Technologies, where she is also a board member. Glassbox designs next-generation software toolsets. These enable content creators globally to harness the power of game engines and real-time production to create stunning, immersive content fast and efficiently for feature film, episodic TV, animation, games and Virtual Reality experiences.
During her career she has worked as a consultant. Also in product marketing positions at companies such as Isotropix, Foundry, Canon UK and Oxygen Games. At RAVEL, she is responsible for building out the product management and marketing team. With the aim of evolving the product to better fit the current and new vertical markets.
Carroll commented on a LinkedIn post, “I’m really happy to share that I’ve just started a new position as Chief Product Officer at RAVEL! Giving me the opportunity to combine my passions for software product management, marketing, and talking to content creators, this is a dream role. I’m super excited to be working alongside Denise Muyco, Chad Knowles, and the whole RAVEL team to create and bring to market solutions that’ll make your cloud and AI transformations a breeze.”
Who is Kaveh Gourdarzian
Gourdarzian spent seven years at Amazon in product management leadership roles for Prime Air and Profit Systems. Where he helped take products from concept to completion. He was also Product Design Director at Resilient, a biomanufacturing company. Gourdarzian has also held product management leader roles at Mercent, VMWare, Microsoft, AT&T Wireless and Fizzylab. He brings around 25 years of experience developing leading-edge products with an innovative approach.
Who is Chad Knowles
Knowles joined in April with experience co-founding four startups and working in Enterprises such as IBM and Dell. He has also worked for over twelve years as a senior advisor to Mediabridge Capital. Which will be useful if Muyco decides to seek funding.
Knowles has deep experience in leading growth organisations and working within a range of sectors. Most recently, he was SVP and GM of Enterprise Solutions Group at Other World Computing. There, he increased quarterly revenue by 36% and gross margin by 81%. He also increased NPS by 21 by creating a new customer experience framework.
He has the responsibility of building a sales and marketing engine to deliver revenue from new sectors and increase the growth in existing ones.
Enterprise Times: What does this mean?
Muyco appears to have built a strong leadership team to accelerate growth. That she has done so without apparent funding (yet) is impressive. With the new team in place, what changes will they make? And how will the co-founders work with them? Knowles has experience working as a CEO and will no doubt work closely with Muyco. Muyco has known Carroll for more than ten years. The four months of consultancy will have been a useful trial period to see how well they worked together.
