Tech Moves: Flexe taps new CTO; Talus adds head of biology; Vouched names a sales VP

Tech Moves covers notable hires, promotions and personnel changes in the Pacific NW tech community.

— Pirasenna Thiyagarajan joined Seattle warehousing logistics and shipping startup Flexe as its chief technology and product officer.

Thiyagarajan in recent years held multiple CTO roles at Bay Area startups. He also worked for nearly six years at Amazon Lab216, an R&D hub based in Sunnyvale, Calif. His most recent role for Amazon Lab216 was head of engineering for last mile technologies, which he left in 2016.

“Piras has a passion for challenging the status quo and pushing the boundaries in understanding customers’ needs, which will help usher in a new era for Flexe as the leader of flexible warehousing infrastructure,” said a LinkedIn post by the company announcing the news.

Flexe reached “unicorn” status with a $1 billion valuation in 2022, but later had multiple rounds of layoffs, with the most recent cuts made earlier this year. Flexe’s former longtime CTO David Glick left his role in January 2023.

— Gaelle Mercenne is now head of biology for Seattle’s Talus Bioscience. The startup last month announced $11.2 million in new funding to advance its drug discovery program for hard-to-treat diseases.

Mercenne was most recently at Sumitomo Pharma America and Recursion Pharmaceuticals.

In her new role at Talus, she will oversee preclinical development, and also lead pre-market studies analyzing the viability of potential drug targets for ailments including cancer, inflammatory, cardiometabolic and rare diseases. 

— Vouched appointed David McGrath as its new vice president of sales. The Seattle startup provides AI-powered identity verification for healthcare, banking and financial services.

McGrath was previously a sales executive at Human API, a healthtech startup that was acquired by LexisNexis Risk Solutions.

Vouched recently announced Peter Horadan as CEO.

— Mark Nelson, a venture partner with Madrona, joined the board of directors of Spotnana, a New York City startup with a platform for booking and planning business travel.

Nelson’s Pacific Northwest pedigree includes serving as president and CEO at Tableau, and CTO at Concur, among other roles.

“I love creating software. It’s what I’ve done for my whole career. It’s fun to be back in the details, and I’m hopeful my experience building software — and specifically building software for the travel industry — will be of use,” Nelson said in a Q&A posted by Spotnana.

— Madrona managing director Soma Somasegar joined the board of directors at Observe, a San Mateo, Calif., startup focused on how machine-generated data is stored, managed and analyzed. Somasegar was a Microsoft corporate vice president for 26 years.

— Matt Medlin has taken a role as a lecturer in the University of Washington’s Master of Science Entrepreneurship program. Medlin works for the Bellevue, Wash., accounting firm Clark Nuber and is a CPA for startups. He is a member of venture capital groups including Alliance of Angels, First Row Partners, SeaChange Fund and others.

— The Washington Research Foundation, an organization helping the UW and others commercialize their innovations, announced its seventh cohort of WRF Venture Analysts. The analysts, who assist with grant making and investment activities, are:

• Bhargav Vemuri, a Ph.D. candidate in Biomedical and Health Informatics at UW who specializes in applications of deep learning methods on biomedical datasets;
• Joseph Albe, a Ph.D. candidate in the UW Department of Immunology focusing on public health and infectious disease;
• Kayla Fasano, another Ph.D. candidate in Immunology, who specializes in immune interactions related to ulcerative colitis;
• Miranda Lyons-Cohen, an Invent at Seattle Children’s Postdoctoral Scholar developing cell therapies for pediatric central nervous system cancers; and
• Kaylie McCraken, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Chemistry at Washington State University focusing on battery technologies.