Head of Google Fiber Leaves, Canva Welcomes a New CFO, and Outsmart College Secures $13M to Make Education Accessible

Free Agency

Welcome to Free Agency, where we share updates on notable career moves in tech. Whether someone is launching a new venture, joining a different company, stepping away to explore new opportunities, or otherwise making waves in the industry, we’re here to help you keep up. 

We're excited to partner with Live Data Technologies to track career moves of key professionals. Their real-time job change data serves investors, tech platforms, HR teams, and major media outlets like WSJ and Bloomberg. Contact Jason Saltzman or visit their website if you want to learn more.

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Free agents

Blake Drager has left his role as Head of Technical Solutions at Google Fiber, where he spent over 8 years. Previously, he held leadership positions at Webpass, including Head of Engineering and Head of Technology, with a focus on telecommunications and network operations.

Adam Cahan has ended his time as CEO of PAX, a plant-based CPG company with over $400M in funding. He was previously at Yahoo, IntoNow (acquired by Yahoo), Auditude, Google and McKinsey. 

Kyle Walsh has left his role as Global Security Operations Center Manager at Stripe. He was previously at Cruise, Bird, Meta and Google. 

Ashwin Nellore has left his job as Head of Data Engineering at Walmart. Previously at PayPal/Braintree/Venmo, he managed petabyte-scale data operations for Payments, Risk, ML, and AI functions.

Just started

Gina Gotthil (former VP of Duolingo), Jorge Mazal (Chief Product Officer at Duolingo) and Daniel Falabella have launched Outsmart College, raising a $13M Series Seed round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Latitud, Lenny Rachitsky, 20VC, Karman Ventures, Tarasa Collective and others. The startup aims to make college education more accessible and equitable worldwide.

Portal Ventures, led by Evan Fisher and Catrina Wang, has launched their second fund, raising an oversubscribed $75M to invest in early-stage crypto companies. The fund exclusively leads pre-seed rounds for crypto startups.

Toby Shevlane, former research scientist at Google DeepMind and Oxford PhD graduate, has launched mntc.ai to build an "LLM superforcaster." At DeepMind, he focused on LLM evaluation, safety, governance, and long-term strategy, following his doctoral research.

Yan L. Sim has launched Operating Crew, a supply chain platform helping DTC brands optimize their operations. Drawing from his experience scaling operations at Warby Parker ($200M to $400M) and Weee! ($50M to $800M), the platform focuses on packaging, shipping, and warehouse fulfillment. Operating Crew is already working with brands generating $3M-$75M in revenue, with Xunyu Foo joining as co-founder.

Jamie Cuffe has launched a new company after spending four years at Retool, where he helped develop seven new products including Workflows and Retool AI. The new venture is already processing thousands of mission-critical operations with early partners and is hiring for their engineering team. The company is focused on AI transformation in a $300B vertical.

Yolanda C. has co-founded Chasely, a developer tools company, in the San Francisco Bay Area. With previous experience from Netflix, Twitter, and DoorDash, she will help lead the company's go-to-market efforts.

Ashish Ranjan Jha has co-founded a stealth startup as CEO, after departing his role as Head of Machine Learning at XYZ Reality where he led ML strategy and development for their MR platform. 

Bo Dong has co-founded Cephia AI as CEO after departing Disney Research Imagineering, where he served as a Senior Research Scientist. The startup, which he launched with two co-founders, is developing groundbreaking sensing technology.

Just left 

Jeremy Barenholtz has departed Neuralink, where he worked on implantable brain-computer interfaces, to pursue his new venture. Jeremy has joined Nudge as Cofounder, President & CTO, alongside cofounders Fred Ehrsam and Quintin Frerichs. They are building non-invasive neuromodulation.

Julius Tarng has departed Linear after serving as Frontend Engineer, where he led the Timeline surface team and worked on spatial, gestural, and AI interfaces.

Just joined