John Vitalie
Chief Executive Officer
John is a seasoned executive, board director, and CEO renowned for driving innovation, growth, financial performance, and customer success.
Before joining Aktana, he led global teams across various technology domains, including AI/ML, SaaS, CRM, and CX. Notably, he spearheaded the scaling of the Healthcare & Life Science business for Salesforce and Siebel Systems, and he led the CX business for Oracle.
John has served as CEO for three different software companies, mostly recently at Aizon. Under his leadership, Aizon pioneered a new market segment by introducing an advanced GxP AI and data management platform specifically designed to optimize biopharma manufacturing. In 2022 he was recognized as one of the Top 25 Biotech CEOs by the Healthcare Technology Report.
John has served as a board member for The Tech Museum of Innovation and eHI (Electronic Healthcare Initiative), while actively participating in various Silicon Valley and Stanford University non-profit associations. He holds a BS degree from Indiana University of Pennsylvania’s business honors program and is an alumnus of the esteemed Stanford Executive Program.
Derek Choy
President & Chief Product Officer
As co-founder of Aktana, Derek spent the last decade developing and refining Aktana’s product, evangelizing Aktana’s vision in the life sciences industry, and delivering Aktana’s products and services to customers across four continents to establish Aktana as the global leader in decision support for life sciences. Now as chief operating officer, Derek is responsible for strategic definition and scalable execution of Aktana’s vision. In this role, he oversees strategy, product, customer success, and services at Aktana.
Prior to co-founding Aktana, Derek held a number of different roles in technology and services sector, developing his expertise in sales force optimization, change management, and technology development and implementation. He drove initiatives to enter new markets and develop new products at Intuit, developed and implemented strategies for a diverse range of public and private sector clients at The Boston Consulting Group, worked at several large law firms in Australia and Hong Kong, and co-founded a medical IT company in Australia.
Derek has dual degrees in computer science and law (honors) from the University of Melbourne.
Morgan Rodd
Chief Financial Officer
Morgan has more than 25 years of experience in the technology industry as a venture capitalist, CFO, corporate development executive and investment banker. His career has been focused on enterprise software, cybersecurity, cloud computing, subscription business models and financial metrics, corporate finance and accounting, and mergers and acquisitions.
Morgan holds an MBA from The Wharton School and BA in history from Wesleyan University.
Mark Desrosiers
Chief Revenue Officer
As Chief Revenue Officer, Mark is responsible for the global sales organization and global revenue growth, as well as ensuring our enterprise customers ultimately achieve their targeted business outcomes and ROI.
Mark is a seasoned sales executive with more than two decades of leadership experience with market leaders in the technology space. He played a pivotal role at Salesforce for more than eight years in multiple sales leadership roles and ultimately became responsible for North American Platform sales. Mark’s data-driven approach and expertise in client partnerships have consistently driven growth and achieved ambitious targets.
In addition to Salesforce, Mark held pivotal positions in other industry-leading companies, including Chief Revenue Officer at Copado, Chief Revenue Officer at Impact, and Group Vice President at Oracle, where his influence and transformative leadership inspired colleagues and emerging sales leaders alike.
Mark holds a BA from University of Maine and is based in our headquarters in San Francisco. When he’s not working long hours, you can find him sailing on San Francisco Bay.
Ramon Garcia
EVP, Global Customer Success & Services
As the EVP, Global Customer Success & Services, Ramon aims to streamline our operations and enhance our ability to deliver exceptional service to our clients globally. He is responsible for ensuring customers achieve their strategic objectives while championing innovation and technology adoption.
Ramon has 25 years of experience in Life Sciences and Healthcare focused on strategy, operations and technology management. He comes with a design-led approach for developing impactful customer journeys across personas to achieve success for customers and patients.
Ramon has led several large-scale transformation programs as a technology management consultant for Fortune 500 companies, mid-sized companies and digital health startups across the United States, Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific.
Ramon started his management consulting career with Andersen Consulting and continued with Accenture, then Deloitte and Wipro. He was most recently with Axtria. Ramon holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.
Pini Ben-or
Chief Science Officer
Pini is an experienced technology leader who oversees artificial intelligence (AI) and analytic innovation at Aktana. He has spent much of his career focused on improving business decisions using advanced analytics, optimization, business intelligence, and machine learning. In addition to being a data science expert, Pini enjoys and excels at building highly capable teams and nurturing a culture of innovation.
Prior to Aktana, Pini served as Global Head of Analytics at Actimize where he helped transform the company from reliance on rule systems and expert models to deploying fully agile machine-learning-based models for financial crime detection. Throughout his career Pini has introduced analytics innovations in the applications of machine learning, data management, operations optimization, marketing channel optimization, and business intelligence. He has multiple patents and patents pending, most recently in the area of machine-learning on network graph data.
Pini has a BSc in Physics, Mathematics, and Philosophy from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a MA and MPhil in Philosophy from Columbia University in NY, where his research areas were Decision Theory, AI, and Philosophy of Physics.
Kris Hinckley
Vice President, People
As VP of People, Kris is responsible for creating and aligning Aktana’s people strategy to enable our business to achieve its key objectives and results. Throughout an employee’s lifecycle, she and her team provide the frameworks and support to ensure Aktana’s talent and leadership are empowered to succeed. Kris has more than 20 years of experience in leading successful teams in fast-paced, performance-based companies.
Before joining Aktana, Kris led the Talent Acquisition function at SoFi, a high-growth Fintech start-up. Prior to SoFi, she led Customer Service Operations at both Peet’s Coffee & Tea and UPS.
Kris holds a BS in Business Administration and Marketing from Eastern Montana College/Montana State University and is based in the San Francisco Bay area.
