Contentful announced today that its Board of Directors has appointed Karthik Rau as the new Chief Executive Officer, succeeding Steve Sloan, who has served as CEO since 2019.

“He is a successful, visionary entrepreneur skilled in both market creation and value creation for enterprises. Critical for us, Karthik is also an outstanding people leader. He galvanizes teams through active listening, collaboration, and decisiveness.”

Karthik brings more than 20 years of leadership experience to Contentful as a company founder and seasoned operating executive. Most recently, Karthik served as founder and CEO of SignalFx, a cloud monitoring company focused on DevOps teams that was acquired by Splunk for $1.05 billion. Previously, Karthik held several leadership roles in the industry, including Vice President of Product Management and Worldwide Marketing at VMware during its early growth years. Karthik was one of the principal executives who led the VMware IPO, the largest technology IPO of 2007.

“Content has become one of the key pillars of every organization’s digital strategy,” said Rau. “The emergence of generative AI will drive exponential growth in content and accelerate the shift from legacy content management systems to Contentful’s market-leading, scalable, and flexible composable content platform. I’m excited to build upon our platform and business success to deliver great value to our customers, beginning with our recently launched Contentful Studio product.”

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“Karthik is exactly the right person to lead us on the next phase of our growth journey,” said Sascha Konietzke, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Contentful. “He is a successful, visionary entrepreneur skilled in both market creation and value creation for enterprises. Critical for us, Karthik is also an outstanding people leader. He galvanizes teams through active listening, collaboration, and decisiveness.”

Konietzke added, “We extend our sincere gratitude to Steve for his four years of dedicated leadership. In that time Contentful’s annual recurring revenue has grown from under $40M to nearly $200M, our customer count to more than 4,000, while our team expanded from nearly 250, mostly located in Berlin, to nearly 800 globally. We are grateful for Steve’s considerable contributions to the company and know Contentful is well-positioned for the exciting opportunities that lie ahead in the next chapter.”

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