Imply Expands Leadership Team as Analytics-in-Motion Becomes Increasingly Central to Enterprise and Digital Native Organizations

Imply, the pioneer of Analytics-in-Motion, and founded by the original creators of Apache Druid, today announced two key hires to its executive team, with Praveen Rangnath joining as Chief Marketing Officer and Kevin Hodgkins joining as Vice President of Customer Success. Rangnath will lead the global marketing team and Hodgkins will lead all global customer success-facing functions.

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“Imply provides the framework within which businesses can fully capitalize those assets beyond traditional methods. In addition to Imply’s unique value proposition, its Customer Success function is laser-focused on helping customers successfully apply and optimize a new framework taking advantage of Analytics-in-Motion.”

“Imply is on a rapid growth trajectory, as organizations worldwide are looking for modern analytics solutions that are interactive, highly scalable, real-time and built for price/performance — or, simply put, analytics-in-motion,” said Fangjin Yang, CEO of Imply. “We are thrilled to welcome two highly intelligent, strategic and proven leaders to accelerate our growth into the era of analytics-in-motion.”

Praveen Rangnath joins Imply from Confluent, where he led the Product Marketing function spanning core product marketing, cloud and partner marketing, solutions marketing, technical marketing and product GTM strategy. Most recently, Praveen was the business lead for Confluent’s first S-1 filing in preparation for the Confluent IPO, as well as the original creator and architect of Confluent’s ‘Data in Motion’ messaging. Prior to Confluent, Praveen built cloud marketing at Splunk and was instrumental in the growth of Splunk’s cloud business and partnership with AWS. Praveen was also an early employee of Sumo Logic, and has held various positions in sales, marketing and management consulting.

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“There are three things certain in life: death, taxes and the advancement of technology,” Rangnath said. “Yesterday’s analytics solutions are invariably slow, static, difficult to scale, prohibitively expensive, or not built for today’s world of data in motion. Accepting one of these tradeoffs is now a competitive disadvantage for the modern business. I am thrilled to join Imply to help the world move towards a new category of analytics, characterized by interactivity, high scalability, cost-effectiveness, and native integration with modern data technologies such as Kafka and Kinesis.”

Kevin Hodgkins joins Imply from Fivetran, where he led Customer Success for the Americas region, including pre-sales engineering, customer support, and customer and technical success management. During Kevin’s tenure he doubled the customer success teams in support of Fivetran’s continued growth. Prior to Fivetran, Kevin last led integration architecture and embedding of Birst into Infor’s Cloudsuite line of SaaS ERP products in addition to running all customer facing technical teams over his tenure at Birst prior to the company being acquired by Infor.

“Throughout my career, I have helped my internal and external customers face challenges making use of their data to advance their businesses. Challenges have included both technology limitations and application of methods and architectures failing to support widespread analysis and full capitalization of all information assets,” said Hodgkins. “Imply provides the framework within which businesses can fully capitalize those assets beyond traditional methods. In addition to Imply’s unique value proposition, its Customer Success function is laser-focused on helping customers successfully apply and optimize a new framework taking advantage of Analytics-in-Motion.”

The expansion of Imply’s leadership team comes on the heels of Imply’s $70 million funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Tiger Global Management. Existing investors A16Z, Khosla Ventures and Geodesic Capital also participated in this round. With the new funding and expanded leadership team, Imply is poised to further extend its leadership position in the rapidly growing area of Analytics-in-Motion.

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