She does not build the AI teammates. She builds the team that builds them - and keeps the promise while everyone else sprints.
There is a title inside fast-moving startups that outsiders never quite decode: Director, Office of the CEO. It sounds ceremonial. It is not. At InstaLILY AI, a New York company teaching software to do real work inside warehouses, ERPs and distribution desks, the title belongs to Caitlyn Pang - and it means she is the one who turns a founder's Tuesday-morning chaos into something the rest of the company can actually execute by Friday.
Start with what she is working on now. InstaLILY builds vertical AI teammates - the company calls them InstaWorkers - that plug into the unglamorous machinery of the physical goods economy. Not chatbots. Agents that reach into legacy systems of record and complete tasks in sales, service and operations, in industries where automation has historically gone to die: distribution, manufacturing, healthcare supply, utilities. In August 2025 the company closed a $25 million Series A led by Insight Partners. That is the loud part, the press-release part. Pang's work is the quiet part that makes the loud part possible.
Her role sits at the exact seam where strategy meets logistics. A fractional Chief of Staff and COO by training and temperament, she is the operator founders lean on to keep teams aligned and to be the steady hand when it matters most. In a 110-person company racing to define a new category, that is not a soft job. It is the connective tissue. Every misfire between what the CEO imagines and what the team ships is a problem that lands, eventually, on a desk like hers.
Before the AI, before the boardrooms, there was a byline. The earliest public trace of Caitlyn Pang is not a funding announcement. It is a set of photo captions in The Harvard Crimson from 2011, documenting a campus flu clinic - a nurse, a needle, the second-floor library pressed into service. It is a small, human beat. But look closely and it rhymes with everything that came after: an eye for the people standing behind an operation, and the patience to describe the ordinary machinery that keeps an institution running.
She studied at Harvard. Then she went where the stakes were higher. At Mercy Corps, the global humanitarian organization, Pang arrived and, during the nonprofit's most challenging years, was asked to step in - supporting the CEO, managing a pile of urgent and competing priorities, and covering support for the global board. This is the crucible where the operator instinct hardens. When a mission-driven organization is under strain, there is no room for a plan that looks good on a slide but collapses on contact with reality. You learn to build the plan that survives Monday.
That experience explains the shape of her career since: a practice as a fractional Chief of Staff and COO, parachuting into founder-led companies to help them scale with confidence. Fractional is a deceptively modest word. It means she has walked into more than one company mid-sprint, diagnosed where the wheels were about to come off, and steadied them - then done it again somewhere else. It is a specialty built on trust earned fast.
InstaLILY's whole pitch is that the hardest place to make AI work is the least glamorous: the distribution-heavy corners of the economy where a single order touches a dozen legacy systems and no two workflows agree. The company's answer is domain-trained agents that execute inside those systems rather than around them. It is a bet that the future of enterprise AI is not a smarter chatbot but a reliable teammate.
Someone has to keep the company that makes that bet coherent. As the team grew and the money arrived, the coordination problem grew with it. New verticals. Deeper integrations. Sales, service and operations all moving at once. The Office of the CEO is where those threads get untangled - where a founder's ambition gets translated into priorities, owners and deadlines. It is unshowy work, and it is the difference between a startup that scales and one that seizes.
What makes Pang distinctive is not a single headline achievement. It is a pattern. Journalism taught her to see the people inside a system. Mercy Corps taught her to hold steady when the system is under fire. The fractional years taught her to earn trust and diagnose fast. InstaLILY is where all three converge - a company betting that AI can finally do the boring, essential work, run day to day by someone who has spent a career doing exactly that for humans.
There is a certain wit to the arrangement. A company building tireless digital teammates, kept on the rails by one very human one. The AI handles the tasks. Pang handles the people who point the AI at the right tasks. It is, in its way, the most honest org chart in the building.
Reporting and photographing campus life for The Harvard Crimson, from student profiles to a flu clinic.
Studies at Harvard University.
Steps in during the nonprofit's most challenging years - supporting the CEO, juggling urgent priorities, covering the global board.
Builds a practice as a fractional Chief of Staff and COO, helping founders scale with confidence.
Serving as Director, Office of the CEO at InstaLILY AI as it raises a $25M Series A led by Insight Partners.
Vertical AI teammates - InstaWorkers - that execute real work inside ERPs, CRMs and legacy tools across distribution, manufacturing, healthcare and utilities.
$25M Series A led by Insight Partners, with Perceptive Ventures and Marvin Ventures. Founded by Amit Shah and Sumantro Das.