Cynthia Perazzo and the work between the breakthroughs

Cynthia Perazzo has a useful line for anyone who has ever sat through a demonstration and wondered why the real world seems so reluctant to cooperate. In 2021, while working at AVIA, she described digital change as a team sport. The technology had to fit an organization. People had to change how they worked. A purchase order, apparently, could only do so much.

There is a small comedy in the distance between buying something new and persuading an institution to use it. The first can be announced. The second involves calendars, competing priorities and someone asking who is responsible. Perazzo’s career has taken her through the territory between those two events: finance, corporate development, strategy, advisory work and, eventually, founding Sovato.

She co-founded the company with Yulun Wang in 2022. After serving as CEO from its beginning, she continued as President and Co-Founder when Brian Miller became chief executive in April 2026. She also remains on the board. The change gives her story a current chapter beyond the familiar founder photograph and the date of incorporation.

The finance degree behind the founder

Perazzo studied finance at the University of Texas at Austin and later completed an MBA at Harvard Business School. Her public education record places those chapters in 1988-1992 and 1994-1996. Before the better-known executive appointments, she worked at Merrill Lynch’s investment banking group and Boston Consulting Group.

Those are recognizable names on a résumé, but the less familiar entries deserve attention. She led business development at Vectis Corporation and co-founded nTrusted, where she was responsible for business development. Sovato was therefore a return to founding, following years spent in larger organizations.

The sequence matters. Describing her only as a former executive who became a founder leaves an earlier act out of the play. Her work had already crossed between established firms and young software ventures. A new company brings its own decisions about customers, partners and what a business can reasonably promise. Perazzo had encountered those questions before.

By 2000, she was taking on a broader corporate brief at Premier. The next nine years would place several of the mechanisms of company building in the same job: strategy, acquisitions, investment, partnerships and new ventures.

Nine years of asking what fits

As Premier’s Vice President of Corporate Development from 2000 to 2009, Perazzo’s responsibilities included mergers and acquisitions, strategic partnerships, venture investments and new business formation. This is a substantial collection of verbs. Buy. Invest. Partner. Build. Each offers a different answer to the question of how an organization should grow.

It also offers a way of reading her later career. Corporate development requires looking beyond a single product to the other organizations around it. A partnership has at least two sets of interests. An acquisition has consequences after the agreement is signed. The attractive proposal still needs an operating arrangement.

In 2009 she joined Hoag as Senior Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. Her brief included organizational strategic planning and business development. The move took her from Premier’s national organization into a role based in Newport Beach, with the relationships and decisions of a regional institution.

One colleague provides an unusually concrete connection between those chapters. Kevin Davidson worked for Perazzo at Premier, then later joined her team at Hoag. His public recommendation describes a leader who set clear expectations and encouraged people to develop. Choosing to work with someone a second time is a rather more interesting detail than another adjective in a biography.

A local chapter, before the startup

In 2015, California’s 72nd Assembly District named Perazzo its Woman of the Year. She was then a Hoag executive, and the recognition identified her with Huntington Beach. This was seven years before Sovato’s founding, a reminder that the most recent company is only one frame around a person’s working life.

Her geography is worth keeping straight. Her public professional profile places her in Huntington Beach; Sovato is based in Santa Barbara. A company’s headquarters and a founder’s home city are separate facts, even when a short introduction is tempted to squeeze them into one.

The district recognition also provides a pause in a career otherwise easy to summarize through business responsibilities. Local institutions keep a different kind of record from startup announcements. Here, the record captures Perazzo during the Hoag years, before the later conference appearances and financing announcements attached to Sovato.

The organization gets a vote

Perazzo moved to AVIA in 2016. Her responsibilities there included regional client engagement, consumer strategy and, later, leading Insights and Advisory. She worked on research and the delivery of advisory services, bringing the examination of new digital tools into contact with the organizations expected to adopt them.

In an October 2021 conversation with Bill Russell, she explained that successful digital work involved executive functions across an organization. Finance and human resources belonged in the picture alongside technology leadership. Her phrase was compact: “digital is a team sport.” Anyone who has tried to schedule a cross-functional meeting may appreciate the ambition contained in those five words.

Her writing that year also addressed enterprise automation, back-office functions and the relationship between digital and physical operations. The argument treated organizational change as work that reaches beyond choosing software. A tool enters an existing set of responsibilities; people still have to decide how those responsibilities will change.

That perspective helps explain the continuity between an advisory career and a founder’s role. Advising means working through a client’s constraints. Founding adds responsibility for the organization offering the solution. In both situations, a good explanation has to survive the moment when someone asks how the arrangement will operate.

“the user experience is fundamental to drive adoption”

Cynthia Perazzo · June 2024

Two careers at the same table

When Perazzo and Wang co-founded Sovato in 2022, they brought different professional histories. Wang had founded Computer Motion and InTouch Health. Perazzo brought business development, institutional strategy and digital advisory experience, along with her earlier experience at nTrusted.

There is a temptation to make every founding partnership into a tidy division of labor. Their backgrounds are enough to make the pairing interesting without assigning them invented roles in a private conversation. One founder had built robotics and remote-connection companies. The other had spent years working on the institutional decisions around new technology.

They appeared together on DeviceTalks in April 2024 and in an October 2024 conversation with Henry Norton. These joint appearances gave the company a public introduction through both co-founders. Perazzo also spoke with Mike Moore in December 2024. In sharing that conversation, she welcomed his willingness to ask hard questions.

That detail has some charm. A founder introducing an interview can simply thank the host. Perazzo singled out the questioning. It fits the practical concerns visible elsewhere in her public work: how a platform fits a market, what partners need from it and how the business around it will function.

Partnerships become a company’s structure

Sovato’s business is organized around working across device systems and organizations. That makes the partnership experience in Perazzo’s earlier jobs relevant to the company’s structure. The work extends to the arrangements connecting organizations, their teams and the technology they use.

Beringea announced its initial investment in July 2024. In November 2025, Sovato announced the closing of its Series B, bringing total company funding to $41 million. Beringea led that round, with participants including founding investor Polaris Partners, Intuitive and other investors. These are company financing milestones, shared by the team that built the business.

Perazzo’s own comments about Beringea emphasize alignment and the investor’s interest in the team and product. It is a familiar concern for a founder: capital arrives with a working relationship attached. The business will continue after the announcement, and its participants will need to keep making decisions together.

The same practical emphasis appeared in a January 2026 interview, when Perazzo discussed operating models and incentives as barriers to adoption. The vocabulary had remained consistent across her move from AVIA to Sovato. New technology still had to find a workable place inside an organization.

A new title, an unfinished brief

On April 7, 2026, Sovato announced Miller as its new CEO. Perazzo continued as President and Co-Founder, and both would serve on the board. Miller brought more than 25 years of experience in robotics and digital innovation. Perazzo’s original CEO chapter had become part of a larger leadership arrangement.

A title change can be easy to lose beneath older speaker biographies and introductions. Here it belongs near the center of the current story. The company she helped start was changing its leadership structure as it prepared for its next stage. Her participation continued in a different role.

Read across her career and the recurring subject is the work between decisions: between an investment and a functioning partnership, between software and a changed routine, between founding a company and building an organization that can keep moving. Those intervals seldom receive a ceremony. They do, however, occupy a considerable part of the calendar. Perazzo has spent much of her career there.