He studied how fluids move through space. Now he studies how deals move through a pipeline - and built a Salesforce company to track every drop.
Akoonu does an unglamorous thing exceptionally well. It sits inside Salesforce and forces a sales team to look hard at the deals they claim are closing. Pipeline reviews. Forecast overlays. An AI sales analyst that flags the opportunity nobody wants to talk about. Jeff Freund founded the company in 2014, and his title there is not "CEO." It is "Chief Akoonerd." That word choice tells you most of what you need to know about him.
Freund is an engineer who wandered into sales software and decided the whole category was being built backwards. Most tools start with the seller and what the seller wants to push. Akoonu started with the buyer - with the slow, messy, human process of how a B2B purchase actually happens. The early product wasn't a forecast dashboard at all. It was a platform for building buyer personas, mapping the buyer's journey, and planning the content that would meet a buyer at each step.
That contrarian instinct has a paper trail. On the Akoonu blog, Freund described the moment that shaped the company: when he started interviewing his own customers to build deep personas, he realized how many buyer insights his team had been flying blind without. The fix was almost embarrassingly simple. Talk to the people who just bought from you, while the experience is still fresh. The insight scaled into a business.
Today Akoonu is a lean operation - a small team running an award-winning Salesforce ISV out of Livingston, Montana, far from the venture corridors of Palo Alto. The product has evolved from persona-building toward AI-driven forecasting, opportunity inspection, and revenue operations. The throughline never changed: software should reflect how buyers behave, not how sellers wish they would.
When I started interviewing customers, I realized how many buyer insights we'd been missing.— JEFF FREUND, ON THE IDEA BEHIND AKOONU
Before any of the software, there was Stanford and an unlikely specialty. Freund earned a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Engineering there in 1995, then stayed on for a Master of Science in Environmental Fluid Mechanics in 1996. It is the kind of degree that prepares you to model rivers and groundwater plumes, not quarterly pipeline. And yet the mental habit transferred cleanly. Fluid mechanics is the study of how things flow through a system under pressure, where they pool, where they leak. Swap "water" for "deals" and you have described Akoonu's product roadmap.
His first technical post was Director of Technology at Network Software Associates in 1997, where he owned the full customer technical lifecycle. Two years later he stepped up to run the show. In 1999 he became CEO and CTO of Clickability, a web content management company, and he held the wheel for more than a decade - through fundraising, through growth, through the eventual sale.
In 2011, Limelight Networks acquired Clickability, and Freund went with it as Vice President and General Manager of Web Content Management. Then he did something most operators never do: he managed the same business out the other door, leading the process to divest Clickability from Limelight to Upland Software. Running a company into an acquisition is hard enough. Running its product line through a second one, on the sell side, is a rare credential.
By 2014 he was ready to start from a blank page. Akoonu was the page.
Akoonu's earliest product mapped buyer personas and the buyer's journey - the conviction that you sell better when you understand how people actually decide to buy.
No bolt-on dashboard in a separate tab. Akoonu is a native Salesforce application, so pipeline reviews and forecasts happen where the sales team already lives.
From Opportunity Maps and Win Maps to an AI sales analyst, the product uses data science to surface the deals worth worrying about - and the ones worth chasing.
We welcome David, Ravi and Sean to our team as we launch Akoonu for Sales to further our mission of revolutionizing account-based selling for B2B organizations.— JEFF FREUND, ON THE 2017 SERIES A & PRODUCT LAUNCH
In April 2017, Akoonu announced an $8M Series A led by Shasta Ventures, paired with the general availability of Akoonu for Sales - billed as the first buyer-aware platform for account-based selling built on the Salesforce platform. The product used data science to generate Opportunity Maps and Win Maps, scoring buyer engagement so sales teams could spend their hours on the deals most likely to actually close.
The round came with reinforcements. Freund brought in a head of sales, a head of products, and a CFO in the same breath as the launch, the classic signal of a founder shifting from building a thing to scaling it. And he did it all while keeping the company headquartered in Livingston, Montana - a town better known for trout streams than term sheets. Running a venture-backed B2B SaaS company from a population-8,000 mountain town is its own quiet statement about where good software can come from.
The company stayed deliberately small. The bet was never headcount. It was the idea that a sales forecast is only as honest as the buyer signals underneath it - and that an engineer who once modeled fluid systems might be exactly the right person to build the instrument that measures the flow.
His graduate degree is in environmental fluid mechanics. He studied how fluids flow before he ever studied how deals flow.
His official company title is Chief Akoonerd - a wink at the data-and-engineering DNA baked into the company name.
He steered the same product through two separate M&A processes: Clickability into Limelight, then back out to Upland.
Akoonu runs out of Livingston, Montana with a lean team - proof that enterprise software doesn't require a Bay Area zip code.