Tech Moves: USAFacts picks Microsoft and Amazon vet as CTO Zillow CMO departs and a lot more

— Tanuja Korlepra, a previous Amazon and Microsoft products management leader, has been named main know-how officer of USAFacts, the Bellevue, Wash.-centered nonpartisan civic data initiative started by previous Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer.

Korlepra has more than 20 several years of knowledge in application engineering. She is included with International Fund for Girls and the Anita Borg Institute for Females in Engineering. In her new part, Korlepra oversees a team of 15, and will guide the generation of programs to evaluate and ingest facts.

USAFacts is a non-earnings started in 2017, dedicated to making use of technologies to make nonpartisan facts more accessible to the US community and drive factual discussion. USAFacts won the 2020 Webby Award for Govt & Civil Innovation.

“USAFacts is empowering Us citizens with nonpartisan and impartial points, which I feel is exceptionally significant in informing point-centered, information-pushed debates,” Korlepra reported.

— Zillow Main Promoting Officer Aimee Johnson is leaving the company right after 3 several years to expend time with her family and re-appraise her subsequent profession transfer. Prior to Zillow, Johnson served in many management and govt roles at Starbucks for 14 a long time. Zillow laid off a quarter of its employees in late 2021 soon after shutting down its homebuying division.

“What’s following? Most immediately, taking individual time following 25+ yrs of get the job done to re-energize, vacation, and invest top quality relatives, friend, and me time,” Johnson wrote on a LinkedIn publish. “Then, onto my following adventure since, as Arianna Huffington said, this is not the wonderful resignation, it’s the excellent re-analysis.”

GeekWire arrived at out to Zillow for a comment.

— Yves Leurquin is the new CEO of Redmond, Wash.-dependent vaccine business Inventprise.

Leurquin was formerly an govt in Takeda and Janssen’s vaccine programs. He normally takes over from earlier CEO and Inventprise founder Subhash Kapre. Kapre is now govt chairman. Leurquin is retaining his seat on Inventprise’s board, which added two new associates: Stewart Parker, former CEO of Seattle’s Infectious Disorder Analysis Institute (now the Access to Wellbeing Institute) and Donna Ambrosino, who has held quite a few biopharma leadership positions, including as CEO of nonprofit vaccine maker MassBiologics.

Inventprise a short while ago also acquired $30 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Basis, the to start with tranche of up to $90 million pledged to help medical growth of the company’s vaccine applicant for pediatric pneumococcal ailment.
— Michael Cooley, former basic supervisor for organization IoT at Kajeet, was appointed as president for KONTXT, messaging and telecom at RealNetworks.

Cooley has more than 20 several years in ecommerce leadership knowledge at Fortune 500 firms these kinds of as Sprint and Deloitte and startups. He will be signing up for in a new role to manage KONTXT, a software program answer that utilizes equipment studying-based mostly purely natural language processing to detect and block fraudulent text, photographs, and cellular phone phone calls.

RealNetworks is a Seattle-centered technological innovation organization that uses AI and computer system vision to provide a variety of media and telecommunications methods. RealNetworks experienced a 2021 income of $58.2 million with 14% advancement in its AI-primarily based organization, KONTXT.

“In just a handful of brief several years, KONTXT has come to be one of the most widely used NLP platforms in the U.S. Telecom industry, blocking thousands and thousands of pernicious spam and phishing textual content messages each day,” claimed Rob Glaser, chairman and CEO at RealNetworks, in a information launch asserting Cooley’s appointment.

Other personnel alterations throughout the Pacific Northwest tech market:

• Phil Greenberg, a Fred Hutch investigator, was elected president of the American Association for Cancer Research. Greenberg will serve in this posture starting up in April.
• Jeff Ross, structure supervisor at NetherRealm Studios (portion of WB Online games), joined Crystal Dynamics, a Bellevue, Clean.-based mostly game organization, as style director.
• Karen Akinsanya, Schrödinger President of R&D for Therapeutics, joined Seattle-based mostly Nautilus Biotechnology‘s board of directors.
• Maddie Clayton, previous software program engineer at Microsoft and Meta, is joining Proxi, a Bellevue, Wash.-based map software program, as director of engineering.
• Laurel Buckner, previously managing director at Seattle-primarily based venture-debt and equity business, WestRiver Group, joined Riverstone Holdings, a Menlo Park, Calif.-based asset administration business.
• Mark Vasconi, director of regulatory products and services at Washington Utilities and Transportation Fee, was appointed to serve as the director of Washington Point out Broadband Workplace

GeekWire reporter Charlotte Schubert contributed to this story.