May 16, 2024

Digimarc

Quinn

Digimarc Corp. named human capital strategist Carle Quinn as the company's chief people officer. Quinn brings expertise in attracting, developing, engaging, and retaining leading talent to drive organizational and business growth. Quinn's background includes human resource management, global strategy, customer advisory, and go-to-market leadership roles at SAP, Citrix, IBM, GE, and QVC. Quinn served as first CPO at Workato and was instrumental in scaling the company for growth. As Digimarc CPO, Quinn will spearhead the company's global human resource function, driving initiatives that foster organizational resilience and optimize performance globally. Digimarc provides digital watermarking technologies, and is based in Beaverton, Oregon.

SSA Marine

Seattle-based SSA Marine announced the launch of a new, dedicated cruise division, as well as the appointment of cruise industry veteran Stefano Borzone as president. The new business unit builds on SSA Marine's service and partnership capabilities and provides a platform for future growth opportunities to meet the growing needs of cruise lines and their customers. A veteran port operations and development executive, Borzone spent several years in senior vice president roles with Carnival Corp., as well as 13 years with Metro Cruise Services, where he served as president. In his new role, Borzone will oversee all SSA Marine cruise operations, while collaborating closely with all joint venture partners, customers, and port authorities. The new division will focus on expanding the company's long-term partnerships with major cruise lines, as well as developing value generating solutions for its cruise, port, and destination partners. Safety, labor relations, and sustainability initiatives will remain as key priorities for the division. SSA Marine is an independent, privately held marine terminal operator, with activities at more than 250 terminal facilities and rail yards in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Central America, South America, and Asia.

Frazier Healthcare Partners

Frazier Healthcare Partners, a private equity and venture capital firm focused exclusively on the healthcare industry, named Maria Molland to the firm's Growth Buyout team as an executive in residence. Molland will work alongside the firm to develop and execute investment strategies focused on women's health and wellness, with a particular emphasis on tech-enabled products and services supporting women through their reproductive and post-partum journeys. In this role, Molland will focus on the sourcing, diligence, and leadership of a new platform investment for Frazier.

Molland has over 25 years of experience leading businesses in women's health, health and wellness, digital media, e-commerce, marketplaces, and sustainability. She most recently served as the CEO and board member at Thinx, and ultimately, she led its sale to Kimberly Clark in early 2022. Molland was a full-time advisor to eBay's CEO, and was the chief European officer at Fab.com. Molland held global executive roles at corporations including Thomson Reuters, Dow Jones, Yahoo, and Disney. Founded in 1991, Frazier Healthcare Partners is headquartered in Seattle, and invests broadly across the U.S., Canada, and Europe.

May 15, 2024

CalmWave

CalmWave has won the “Health Innovation of the Year” at the 2024 GeekWire Awards. The award showcases health, life science, biotechnology, or medical breakthroughs that illustrate how technology is transforming healthcare and that hold promise for bettering lives or improving healthcare. This is CalmWave's second consecutive GeekWire Award, following last year's award for UX Design of the Year. CalmWave uses a Transparent AI platform to analyze hospital data and minimize alarms in the ICU. The platform ingests the hospital's high-frequency data from diverse sources, including electronic medical record systems, on-network medical devices, and patient vital signs, and distills that data into actionable information. CalmWave went from inception to funding at the AI2 Incubator, a startup incubator at the Allen Institute for AI. Headquartered in Seattle, CalmWave has raised a pre-seed round led by Bonfire Ventures with participation from Tau Ventures, AI2 Incubator, SeaChange Ventures, Hike Ventures, and the co-founders of PagerDuty. Ophir Ronen is the founder and CEO of CalmWave.

Lattice Semiconductor

Lattice Semiconductor's Lattice Avant FPGA platform was selected as a 2024 SEAL Award winner. Lattice Avant was recognized in the Sustainable Product category for its leadership power efficiency, performance, and small form factor.“Sustainability is a key focus area for Lattice and we are honored to receive this recognition for our Lattice Avant FPGA platform, which continues to extend our low power FPGA leadership across diverse markets like Communications, Computing, Industrial, and Automotive,” said Esam Elashmawi, chief strategy and marketing officer. Lattice Semiconductor is based in Hillsboro, Oregon.

May 14, 2024

Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani

Hicks

Gordon Rees Scully Mansukhani added Donell Andre Hicks as a partner in the Construction Practice Group in the firm's Seattle office. Hicks is experienced in handling various disputes in all types of construction cases, including residential, commercial, condominium, and homeowner association claims. In transactional, litigation, mediation, and arbitration, he represents multiple construction industry professionals, including developers, property owners, contractors, subcontractors, architects, and engineers. His construction litigation experience includes disputes involving construction defects, breach of contract and construction delays. Hicks earned this law degree from The George Washington University School of Law, and his undergraduate degree from Cornell University. GRSM has offices in all 50 states, and its Construction Group consists of over 200 lawyers across the U.S., specializing in a broad spectrum of legal services tailored for the construction industry.

Leafly Holdings

Seattle-based Leafly Holdings, an online cannabis discovery marketplace and resource for cannabis consumers, announced that Peter Lee will join Leafly as president and chief operating officer. Lee will lead new monetization efforts, operations and corporate development. He will remain a member of Leafly's Board of Directors. Lee brings more than 25 years of strategic leadership and more than five years of cannabis industry experience, as well as deep knowledge of both public markets and public equities. He served as president, chief financial officer and member of the board of directors of Merida Merger Corp.until it merged with and into Leafly as part of Leafly's go-public transaction in 2022. Lee has been a member of Leafly's Board of Directors ever since. From 2011 to 2018, he co-founded and was a managing partner at Sentinel Rock Capital, a long/short equity-oriented hedge fund. He has held various roles at other long/short equity-oriented hedge funds at Spring Point Capital, Blackstone Kailix, and Tiger Management. Lee started his career as an analyst at Morgan Stanley Capital Partners, the private equity investment fund of Morgan Stanley.

Yoko Miyashita is CEO of Leafly.

May 10, 2024

Ascendent Demolition

Saber

Ascendent Demolition hired David Saber as its new safety director. Saber will bolster Ascendent's safety program by creating safety policies, identifying hazards, training employees, encouraging safety through various techniques, and working with others throughout the organization to ensure health and safety principles are always improving.

PitchBook

PitchBook, a financial data and software company, announced that John Gabbert will be stepping down as chief executive officer. Gabbert will work closely with Morningstar CEO Kunal Kapoor over the next several weeks to appoint his successor. In the meantime, Rod Diefendorf, PitchBook chief operating officer, and PitchBook's executive leadership team will assume management responsibilities. Gabbert founded PitchBook in 2007 with a vision for providing transparency into the global private capital markets through data, research and tools. He established proprietary data operations processes to collect and verify hard-to-find financial datasets across private equity, venture capital, and M&A markets. Building on this foundation, PitchBook then introduced news and institutional research as well as a suite of workflow and analysis tools, which today create the PitchBook Platform. In 2016, Morningstar acquired PitchBook, which now operates as an independent subsidiary. Morningstar also acquired LCD in 2022 and integrated it into the PitchBook Platform. PitchBook, with U.S. headquarters in Seattle, operates globally with more than 3,000 team members.

Cyemptive Technologies

Seattle-based Cyemptive Technologies, a provider of cybersecurity solutions for business and government, named former IBM and Hitachi Partner executive Wessel Graatsma as vice president cybersecurity solutions Europe. In his new role, Graatsma will be responsible for business development and directing Cyemptive's business in select European markets. His initial focus will be on developing business and partners in Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg), the Nordic countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland) and Spain. Graatsma brings more than 35 years of experience in developing business with channel partners, distributors, service providers, cloud providers and OEM partners. This announcement is the latest in a series of international appointments the company has made in the past six months as it scales up for the next level of growth in Europe.