Spotnana leadership team

Steve is a travel industry veteran and through the Madrona Venture Group, where he serves as Managing Director, he is an investor in Spotnana. Steve serves as our Executive Chairman and is actively involved at Spotnana. Before joining Madrona in 2020, Steve was the founder and CEO of Concur, and served on the Executive Board of SAP running SAP’s cloud business group.

Steve currently serves as the Chairman of IDG, the Executive Chairman of Troop, Stratify, Magnify, and Center, and serves on the board of Clari and Leaf Logistics.

Sarosh has spent over 20 years building successful businesses in the travel space. As founder and CEO of Spotnana, he leads the company’s efforts to build the industry’s first Travel-as-a-Service Platform. His passion is to provide the travel industry with a modern technology stack that opens the door to a new generation of traveler experiences.

Before Spotnana, Sarosh founded WTMC, which was the first travel management company to build direct connections to global airlines at the highest possible level of certification. Outside of Spotnana, Sarosh loves cooking and sharing meals with colleagues, friends, and family.

Shikhar has spent the last decade building powerful data and AI/ML platforms. As co-founder and CTO of Spotnana, he leads the company’s efforts to solve the travel industry’s most complex technical challenges.

Prior to Spotnana, Shikhar was a founding engineer at ThoughtSpot, where he led the architecture of its data analytics and warehousing solution. He was also part of Google Brain building the leading Deep Learning open source tool TensorFlow. He likes to advise and mentor budding entrepreneurs, and loves volunteering for education based NPOs.

Shilpi leads Spotnana’s Customer Success and Travel Operations teams. She ensures Spotnana delivers exceptional experiences to customers and travelers while accelerating customer adoption, growth, and value. With over 20 years of experience in customer-centric leadership roles, Shilpi is known for delivering customer-driven growth, driving operational effectiveness, and building high-performance organizations that scale.

Prior to Spotnana, Shilpi was the Chief Customer Officer at Bolt. She also worked at Meta’s first enterprise SaaS business, spearheading the growth of their largest and most complex customers. She earned a Bachelor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree from USC and an MBA from UCLA. Outside of Spotnana, Shilpi loves to travel the globe with her family, and she is excited to work at a company that combines her professional and personal passions.

Ashish Chaudhary is dedicated to shaping product strategy, envisioning innovative ideas, and leading a team of product and design experts to create products that both align with customer needs and drive business growth.

Ashish brings extensive experience in scaling companies, having held leadership roles at American Express, Microsoft, PayPal, Blackhawk Network, Twilio, and most recently at Weave Communications, where he took the company public on the NYSE. Ashish holds a Master’s degree in machine design from Indian Institute of Technology – Madras.

Johnny is a global technology evangelist in the corporate travel and mobile world with proven ability to start new business and develop new services within large companies. His experience includes negotiating and closing “impossible deals” between global enterprise buyers, start-up suppliers, and major established industry players.

Johnny’s extensive travel technology background ranges from writing code, to marketing new products and services, to creating completely new business models that drive disruptive innovation. He has held senior positions in companies such as GetThere, Sabre, Travelport, conTgo, Concur, SAP, Mezi and American Express Digital Labs prior to joining Spotnana.

Jessica leads the Global People Team at Spotnana who focuses on recruiting, retaining and developing Spotnana’s most valuable asset, its people. She strives to cultivate an environment where employees thrive, grow and develop, feel valued, respected and included, and have the best moments of their career.

Jessica has led people teams at tech companies through high growth stages, including IPOs, as well as ownership and leadership changes. Prior to Spotnana, Jessica was Head of People at Braze leading them through a successful IPO in November 2021 (Nasdaq: BRZE) and GroundTruth (formerly xAd)

Bill is responsible for Spotnana’s supplier relationships. Prior to Spotnana, Bill served as COO of American Express Global Business Travel, where he led the company’s global operational delivery teams. He also served for many years as COO of HRG, where he led innovations in HRG’s technology, distribution, product development, and client data, as well as leading the growth and ultimate sale of its Fraedom payments business to Visa.

Starting his career in the Civil Service, Bill moved into the travel industry in 1980, holding various positions in distribution technology with British Caledonian Airways and Amadeus Global Travel Distribution before joining HRG.

Bill oversees Spotnana’s go-to-market strategy globally and leads Spotnana’s sales organization. Bill was the first sales hire at Outtask, where he led the launch of Cliqbook Travel in the US before relocating to London to build Outtask’s European business. After Concur acquired Outtask in 2006, Bill held multiple leadership roles across Concur’s Global and SMB Travel & Expense business units, helping grow revenue from $50M to $2B.

Bill spent six years with SAP after Concur was acquired in 2014 and led SMB sales. Before joining Spotnana, Bill led sales and customer success for Thrive Global.

Jessica is responsible for overseeing company financial operations and projecting future investments and plans.

Prior to Spotnana, Jessica spent over a decade at Concur and SAP where she held multiple leadership roles throughout the finance and accounting organizations. In addition, she worked at Ernst & Young providing audit and assurance services.  Jessica holds Bachelors and Masters degrees in Accounting and Financial Management from the University of San Diego and is a Certified Public Accountant.

Justin leads the Spotnana marketing team, which is responsible for the company’s brand, communications, product marketing, and demand generation. He most recently led marketing at Blend as it grew from a startup through to a successful IPO.

Prior to joining Blend, Justin spent nearly 5 years in ad tech serving as Corporate CMO at Acxiom and Head of Marketing at LiveRamp. Earlier in his career, Justin held leadership positions at Lithium, MarketTools, and Symantec. He is a graduate of the University of California, San Diego, and holds an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley Haas School of Business.

Michelle brings over 25 years of travel industry experience to Spotnana. She started her career as a travel agent and has since held numerous back-end and front-end roles. Prior to Spotnana, Michelle worked for industry giants such as Diplomat Tours, Globalstar, Casto Travel, and Navan; she facilitated travel for Oakland A’s, Discovery Network, San Jose Earthquakes, and Netflix. 

Under the direction of Shilpi Narang, Michelle manages the Customer Experience Agents, Testing, Training and QC teams.

Cynthia leads the Implementation and Customer Success teams for all customer segments across the life-cycle. She is an accomplished tech start-up leader, focused on digitizing the customer journey to drive value at scale.

Throughout her 10+ years in B2B SaaS at companies like Yammer, Microsoft, and Gloat, she has built and led global, hybrid teams tasked with implementation, onboarding, community, consulting services, change management, support, renewals, and operations. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Florida in Political Science with a concentration in Public Administration.

Jini Chatterjee is Head of Legal at Spotnana. She oversees Spotnana’s legal function, working closely with business and technology teams across the business. Prior to Spotnana, she represented technology companies on commercial, corporate and IP transactions at WSGR, Skadden, and Disney/Pixar. 

As a “global citizen” who grew up in India, Hong Kong, Thailand, Singapore and the United States, Jini is a passionate advocate of Spotnana’s mission to bring communities together through travel. When she’s not knee-deep in contracts, you can find her climbing or running near her (current) home in San Francisco, California. Jini completed her undergraduate degree at Brown University and her JD at University of Pennsylvania.

As the Head of Spotnana’s People Team in India, Shilpi is dedicated to enhancing organizational capabilities and fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement. Her focus revolves around nurturing and developing high performance teams that consistently achieve exceptional results. In her role, she manages a wide spectrum of responsibilities, including overseeing India’s HR operations, learning and development initiatives, compensation, payroll and benefits administration, talent acquisition, diversity & inclusion efforts, and performance management.

Prior to Spotnana, Shilpi held key leadership roles at companies like GroundTruth, Rackspace, and NTT Data, where she successfully scaled HR practices and crafted robust people strategies to achieve organizational excellence.

Savannah leads communications and public relations to elevate Spotnana’s profile in the marketplace. Prior to Spotnana, Savannah managed communications at high-growth SaaS companies ClickUp and Iterable, overseeing announcements, media relations, executive speaking engagements, and awards. In her agency days, Savannah worked at a boutique communications agency called cred where she built and managed speaking programs for high-level tech executives at companies like Instacart, Rippling, and Flexport.

Manish leads the Engineering team for Air, driving the development of a best-in-class flight booking experience and establishing deep direct integrations, including NDCs, with some of the world’s top airlines. His focus is on solving long-standing industry challenges and revolutionizing the travel landscape through Spotnana’s Travel as a Service platform.

Prior to Spotnana, Manish helped build Accelya/Farelogix’s core NDC product, encompassing offer and order management. Throughout his career, Manish has excelled in various capacities, including overseeing technology, sales engineering, and product portfolios. His unwavering passion for bringing innovation to airline technology remains at the forefront of his endeavors.

Manish is a prominent industry contributor and influencer, recognized as a leading voice in NDC and airline retailing.

Ashish Popli is dedicated to keeping Spotnana product and enterprise secure and compliant to industry standards and customer requirements.

Ashish brings extensive experience in scaling security, privacy and compliance for hyper growth organizations, having held leadership roles at Google, Microsoft and most recently at UiPath, where he built a strong security program and culture from ground up, while supporting the company’s growth from series C to IPO. Ashish holds a Master’s degree in Computer Science and has been practicing security for over 25 years.

Dr. Matthew T. Riccio, MA, MPhil, PhD, is Head of Data Analytics & Reporting at Spotnana. With more than 15 years experience in private, public, industry and academic settings, Matt specializes in the applied use of data and advanced analytics for actionable insights and recommendations.

A former National Science Foundation research fellow and faculty member at both New York and Columbia University, Matt now spearheads Spotnana’s data-related initiatives. In his role, he liaises between key internal and external stakeholders to meaningfully capture, track, visualize and report on critical metrics to, ultimately, positively impact KPIs via data-driven decision making.

Carolyn leads Spotnana’s Growth Marketing function, which includes making sure that potential buyers and partners are aware of, know and trust, and want to work with Spotnana. Functionally, this includes full customer lifecycle marketing – awareness through renewal, demand generation, account based marketing, talent brand, social media and digital channels, and campaigns. 

Prior to Spotnana, Carolyn led marketing and growth teams at several high growth tech companies including most recently at Logicgate. Before that, Carolyn led SEO at United Airlines, and held several editor roles at various industry and B2B publications. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Indiana University in Bloomington, IN.

Sheryl leads Spotnana’s Product Marketing team and is responsible for communicating Spotnana’s value to customers and internal teams alike. This means articulating what customers are struggling with, how Spotnana can solve their problems, and what sets Spotnana apart in the market. 

Prior to Spotnana, Sheryl spent the last decade within the advertising technology space. She has most recently served as a product marketing leader at Spotify – joining prior to their IPO – and Amazon Ads. Earlier in her career, Sheryl worked on the advertiser supply side, including publisher USA Today, and also on the advertising agency side at world leading holding companies, including Publicis, Interpublic Group, and WPP. Sheryl holds a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature from Rutgers College, Rutgers University.

Saleem Faneeband is a visionary Technology Executive bringing 25 years of expertise in powering engineering for multibillion-dollar growth, building and scaling systems with roughly one billion requests per day, leading a global team of 250+ employees, streamlining acquisitions, optimizing operations, and enhancing partnerships. His experience in PayPal, NetApp, Symantec & Accenture showcases a unique blend of strategic thinking, organizational development, and technology expertise.

Saleem is leading multiple engineering functions including Data & AI, Customer setup & lifecycle and Agent Enablement

Kevin leads platform infrastructure, Devops, SRE and Quality teams with focus on building enterprise grade of reliability, scalability and quality of Spotnana travel platform. 

Prior to Spotnana, Kevin was an engineering leader at Meta supporting company-wide compute, pipeline and workload management platforms. Before that, Kevin was in senior leadership roles at Adobe Systems, HPE and high growth startups. Kevin holds a Bachelor’s degree in EECS from University of California, Berkeley and MBA from Santa Clara University.

Apurva Prakash brings 24 years of experience to the forefront of Networking, Observability, and Security domain. Known for building a 200-strong team from the ground up and holding multiple patents, Apurva’s expertise in 4G/5G and cybersecurity is unparalleled. 

At Spotnana, he leads the development of a revolutionary Travel Platform framework and API integration, merging travel needs with advanced SaaS technology.

Seb leads product management at Spotnana for our Air, Corporate, Data & AI, Event and Front End Infrastructure teams.

After graduating with a Computer Science degree from Stanford, he naturally found his way to product after stints in venture capital and engineering. He is passionate about cultivating a world-class product team, and building a collaborative and forward-thinking environment to push the boundaries of what is possible in travel.

Srividya Sriram (Sri) is the Director of Product Design at Spotnana. She leads Spotnana’s Product Design team on our mission to create best-in-class product experiences and interfaces for our varied personas. 

Prior to Spotnana, Sri designed delightful user experiences at companies like Freshworks and Google. Her portfolio spans significant contributions across a variety of design disciplines and products (both B2C and SaaS). A bachelor’s degree in Visual Communication from the University of Madras and an M.Des from Carnegie Mellon University serve as the foundation of her 15+ years in the field. Outside of work, Sri enjoys spending time with her loved ones and building her painting and calligraphy chops.

Angeles has dedicated the last 20 years to building strong connections with TMC and Multinationals around the world, focusing on each country’s cultural uniqueness, and creating Global solutions by acknowledging local challenges and differences. She Joined Spotnana in February 2022 to facilitate the creation of the Spotnana Global Community.

Prior to Spotnana, she acted as Strategic Advisor for companies like Dnata from Emirates Group and SVP for Travel Leaders Group. Angeles was responsible for the strategic direction, development and execution of Travel Leaders’ international growth strategy. Earlier in her career, Angeles worked with the World Tourism Organization in Africa on a variety of special projects.

As the Head of Growth at Spotnana, Avi is responsible for driving revenue through analytical decisioning, creating a data-driven culture to drive strategic decision-making, and defining growth-oriented playbooks across product and business teams.

Avi is a seasoned growth leader with a passion for scaling companies. She has over 15 years of experience in product and business roles at Meta, Oracle as well as advisory and board positions with startups and small businesses across various industries. Avi’s proven success lies in driving business growth through a keen grasp of market dynamics and customer requirements, ensuring exceptional customer satisfaction. Notably, she spearheaded seller growth at Facebook Marketplace by developing the market expansion playbook and pioneering product led strategies for global expansion. Her impact propelled Facebook Marketplace to scale to over 250 M monthly active sellers and greater than 1B monthly active users. Avi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Design from Apeejay Institute of Design, India and an MBA from University of San Francisco.

Andrew leads content marketing at Spotnana. He works with internal stakeholders and external partners to develop and execute content strategies that support Spotnana’s marketing efforts throughout the customer journey.

Prior to Spotnana he served in senior editorial roles at travel industry publication Skift and as an editor at Travel Market Report and Questex Hospitality & Travel Group. Andrew holds a Bachelor’s degree in Journalism from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Sean leads the Learning & Development function, which primarily focuses on employee skill development and the application of learning that contributes to the accomplishment of business objectives. With over a decade in the corporate training space, Sean has been responsible for leading core L&D elements including Learning Analysis & Strategy, Learning Experience Design, Facilitation, and Learning Program Design & Management.

Prior to Spotnana, Sean led internal L&D teams at several high-growth tech companies, most recently Braze, where he built and led the L&D team contributing to the organization’s growth from private company through IPO to successful public company.