Profile
When the Data Finally Makes Sense
Here is a thing Owen Frivold did: he built a boutique advisory firm called Winter Sun, spent two years running it for "future-shaping brands and leaders," and then watched Cleartelligence acquire it in April 2024 specifically to land him as President. Twelve months later, he was named CEO. It is an unusual sequence. Most executives join a company. Frivold made them buy his first.
The move makes more sense when you understand what Cleartelligence is trying to become. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in Newton, Massachusetts, the firm operates at the collision point of enterprise data and artificial intelligence - helping organizations in financial services, life sciences, manufacturing, retail, and the public sector turn raw information into what they call "Decision Intelligence." When private equity firm Align Capital Partners backed Cleartelligence in December 2022, the ambition shifted. Growth became the mandate. Frivold - a Silicon Valley veteran with a network built across Fortune 500 brands - was precisely the kind of leader that ambition required.
Before Cleartelligence, before Winter Sun, there was Hero Digital. Frivold co-founded it in 2014, serving as Executive Vice President of Strategy through 2022. What Hero Digital did, at its best, was bridge the widening gap between technology and experience - the space where a company's data capabilities either make or break the customer relationship. His clients included Apple, Sephora, Airbnb, and Lucid Motors. The work was not about screens or software; it was about the intelligence underneath them.
"I am honored to take on this role at such a pivotal time for Cleartelligence. The company has built a strong reputation for delivering exceptional data solutions to market leaders and for being a leader in driving the adoption of Decision Intelligence for private equity-backed portfolio companies."
- Owen Frivold, on his appointment as CEO, April 2025
The Stanford education - a BA in Communication and Italian, class of 2008 - tells you something about how Frivold thinks. Most technologists go to Stanford for computer science or engineering. He studied how humans talk to each other, and how one of Europe's most expressive languages carries meaning in layers. Apply that sensibility to enterprise software and what you get is someone who asks not just "does the data pipeline work?" but "does anyone actually understand what the data is saying?"
That question sits at the heart of Cleartelligence's pitch. The firm partners with the core tools of the modern data stack - Snowflake, Databricks, dbt, Fivetran, Tableau, Power BI, Sigma - and builds the consulting layer that makes those tools intelligible to the humans who are supposed to make decisions with them. The tagline is direct: "When you trust your data, everything is possible." Frivold's job is to make companies believe that sentence, then prove it.
His first major strategic move under the CEO title came in July 2024 - before he even held the top job officially - when Cleartelligence acquired Bardess Group, deepening its industry expertise and expanding its solution catalogue. It was a signal: the firm was not going to be a quiet, steady consultancy. It was going to grow by getting bigger, better, and broader, fast.
Frivold describes the B2B world through a consumer lens. "Seamless experiences and self-service functionality from B2C have become standard expectations in B2B environments," he has noted - a reminder that the enterprise software buyer is also a person who uses Uber and Spotify. The patience they once extended to clunky enterprise tools has not merely diminished. It has evaporated. Cleartelligence's value proposition sits in that gap: make enterprise data feel as legible as a well-designed app.
There is also the AI piece, which in 2025 is unavoidable and everywhere and, in most organizations, deeply unresolved. Cleartelligence has built an "AI Readiness" offering precisely because most companies want the benefits of artificial intelligence without having fixed the underlying data problems that would make AI useful. Frivold is well-positioned for this moment - his background spans the whole stack, from customer experience at the surface to data architecture in the basement.
Outside the office, the picture is distinctly non-corporate. Dual French-American citizen. Four languages, three fluent. Hiker. Scuba diver. His Twitter handle is @of8, which reveals nothing and everything about a person who does not need his digital presence to explain him. He grew up in Redwood City, California, a suburb that has quietly produced a remarkable number of technology operators, before heading up the peninsula to Stanford. The Bay Area never quite let go - he remains based there, running a Massachusetts-headquartered firm from the West Coast in the casually distributed way that modern professional services companies operate.
The Fast Company Executive Board listed him. The Enterprisers Project publishes his thinking. Icreon, the digital engineering firm, added him to its board. These are not vanity credentials. They are the visible traces of someone who has spent a career building credibility by saying useful things to the right audiences - which is, come to think of it, exactly what good data strategy looks like.
