Eric
Shoemaker

Keebo sells autonomous optimization for cloud data warehouses. Its software watches how companies run queries on Snowflake and Databricks, then reshapes infrastructure, routing, and warehouse sizing in the background to cut spend while holding performance guarantees in place. The pitch is that the savings arrive without an engineer rewriting a single query.

Shoemaker is not the scientist behind that technology. He is the operator brought in to sell it at scale. He succeeded co-founder Barzan Mozafari, who stepped back into a co-founder role while remaining involved. The handoff follows a familiar pattern in enterprise software: a research-born company reaches the point where the next chapter is about go-to-market, and it hands the wheel to someone who has driven that route before.

He has. Shoemaker spent years in the unglamorous, high-stakes corners of enterprise tech - security, multi-cloud management, infrastructure discovery - where the product is rarely flashy and the value is measured in dollars saved or breaches avoided. At CloudHealth, he helped grow revenue from zero to roughly $100 million in ARR over about seven years, a run that ended in the company's acquisition by VMware. Before that he held leadership roles at Bit9, which became Carbon Black. Most recently he was Chief Revenue Officer at Device42, staying through its $230 million sale to Freshworks.

The through-line is cost and infrastructure. CloudHealth was about seeing and controlling cloud spend. Device42 was about mapping what an enterprise actually runs. Keebo sits one layer deeper, inside the data warehouse itself, where costs have quietly ballooned as companies pour more workloads into Snowflake and Databricks. For a leader who has spent a career near that meter, it is a natural next stop.

Keebo's own origin story leans on credibility from research rather than a garage. The company traces its core "Data Learning" approach to roughly 15 years of AI and database work at the University of Michigan, UCLA, and MIT. That academic pedigree is the raw material; Shoemaker's job is to turn it into repeatable enterprise revenue - expanding partnerships, building out the sales motion, and pushing adoption among larger customers.

His framing of the opportunity is characteristically economic. "Positioned at the intersection of AI, data infrastructure, and cost optimization, Keebo is uniquely equipped to deliver measurable business impact," he said on his appointment. It is a sentence with no hype in it, which is rather the point. In a market flooded with AI promises, Keebo's argument is narrower and more checkable: your bill goes down, and you can prove it.

There is also a track record of timing worth noting. Shoemaker has repeatedly landed at companies in the window before a major deal - CloudHealth to VMware, Bit9 into Carbon Black, Device42 to Freshworks. Whether that is instinct or coincidence, it has given him a rare, up-close view of what it takes to move an enterprise software company from momentum to outcome. Keebo is now the whole company to run, not just the revenue line, and that is the new test.