— Veteran Seattle-area software entrepreneur Jordan Schwartz joined Sēkr, a San Diego startup that aims to help “vanlife” travelers find campsites and community, as its chief product officer.
Schwartz previously founded and led Pathable, a Seattle startup that built mobile apps for conferences and pivoted during the pandemic to focus on virtual events before getting acquired in 2020.
Schwartz, who also worked at Microsoft for a decade, said Sēkr’s app is “near and dear to my heart” given his passion for camper vans and the impact they’ve had on his family “to truly travel freely.”
“God, I love it,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “And now, to be working on a product that helps hundreds of thousands of people do that same thing and unlocks serendipity for them the way it did for me is unbelievably fulfilling.”
Founded in 2017, Sēkr raised a $2.25 million round last year.
— Longtime telecom leader Cole Brodman joined Seattle-based Opanga Networks as CEO.
Brodman previously spent more than a decade at T-Mobile, holding positions as CMO and CTO. He left T-Mobile in 2012 and spent the next four years as a board member for a handful of startups before joining mobile networking startup M87, which was acquired by XCOM in 2019.
Opanga initially got started in 2005. The company now focuses on using machine learning to boost software used by telecom companies and network operators. Its Opanga RAIN product is an AI-powered radio access network optimization platform.
Brodman has been on Opanga’s board since 2015. He replaces founder Dave Gibbons, who retired.
— University of Washington computer science professor Aylin Kamelia Caliskan was named co-director of the UW Tech Policy Lab, an interdisciplinary collaboration founded in 2013 by the UW’s computer science school. Caliskan replaces UW professor Batya Friedman.
— Dr. Sunita Mishra, chief medical officer of Amazon Health Services, joined the board of URAC, a healthcare accreditation nonprofit.
