Orisa
Cherenfant

Orisa Cherenfant does not show up at conferences to be seen. She shows up to change what the conversation is about. At MWC Barcelona 2026, she was on stage at the Open Gateway Summit talking about how network-based authentication APIs are reshaping trust in digital communication. This was not a panel seat. This was the argument that the whole room was there to hear.

That is the cadence of her career. She has spent years building the infrastructure behind growth - not the press releases, but the deals, the partnerships, the operational scaffolding that makes companies go faster. At Twilio, as SVP of Industry Relations & Strategic Growth, she is the person who figures out how a $5 billion cloud communications company continues to expand its reach into sectors that are not yet paying full attention.

Her story starts far from Silicon Valley. Originally from Cape Verde - the Portuguese-speaking island nation off the West African coast - she came to the United States and put herself through Boston College's Carroll School of Management as a first-generation student. She graduated with dual degrees in Finance and Marketing. That combination turned out to be the exact shape of what she would need.

Before Twilio, there was GE. She joined General Electric's leadership development programs and worked her way into roles with real commercial weight. As VP of Commercial Operations & Strategy at GE Digital, she built a 13-person team responsible for sales operational excellence, designed performance frameworks, and managed incentive programs for roughly 200 digital sellers. The scale of that task - keeping 200 salespeople pointed in the same direction while building the infrastructure to measure whether it was working - requires a particular kind of discipline. She built it.

Then she moved into the CFO seat at Baker Hughes GE Digital. Financial planning, commercial finance, accounting, sourcing - the whole stack. She did not move into that role as a finance technician. She moved in as someone who understood how commercial decisions create or destroy margin, and how to explain that to people who were not finance people.

That translation skill - between the financial model and the business outcome - is what makes her different from most executives who carry similar titles. She does not manage spreadsheets. She manages the belief that the numbers are telling a story worth listening to.

At Twilio, the job is different. Twilio is a developer-first company - one that built its name by making it easy for software engineers to add phone calls, SMS, and verification to their applications without building telecom infrastructure from scratch. The challenge now is not getting developers to adopt. The challenge is getting entire industries to understand that Twilio belongs at their strategic table, not just in their tech stack.

That is Orisa's problem to solve. Industry relations at this scale means building relationships with carriers, regulators, telecom partners, and enterprise leaders who think about communication infrastructure in fundamentally different terms than developers do. It means being conversant in GDPR, telecom compliance, network authentication protocols, and AI-driven personalization - and then explaining to a room of executives why those things connect to their revenue.

She was also named to the 2025 Entreprenista 100, an annual list recognizing accomplished women leaders. The recognition was not for a startup or a product launch - it was for the kind of career trajectory that women in matrixed corporate environments rarely receive credit for building in public. Orisa received it anyway.

She now lives in Los Angeles with her partner Eli and their four-year-old twins, Margaux and Maverick. She has a YouTube channel. She hosted Twilio's top sales performers at Sales Club 2025. She also holds a director role at Syniverse, the telecom interconnection company that sits quietly behind billions of international messages. The overlap between that role and her Twilio work is not accidental - it is the kind of cross-sector positioning that comes from understanding where the industry is going before it publicly announces it is going there.

She is not the loudest person in the room. But she is reliably the person who understood the room before she walked in.