Profile / New York / Vertical AI

Paul
Szemerenyi

A Royal Navy submariner turned repeat SaaS CEO, now running an AI platform that verifies insurance across 2.7 billion square feet of real estate.

CEO, JONES · Est. 2017 · 11 W 25th St, NEW YORK

Two men on a blue couch, one of them holding your COI: Paul Szemerenyi (left) with Jones co-founder Omri Stern. A pampas-grass vase, a book called Engineering in Plain Sight, a New York window. This is the office where a submariner takes over a vertical AI company.

The Lede

He started underwater.

On January 15, 2026, Jones - a New York software company most people outside commercial real estate have never heard of - announced that Paul Szemerenyi would take over as chief executive from co-founder Omri Stern. Stern moves to the board. Szemerenyi takes the operating keys. Between the two dates on the press release, a lot happens: 231 employees keep working, 36,000 construction projects keep uploading certificates of insurance, and 2.7 billion square feet of real estate remains under Jones-managed compliance risk.

Szemerenyi's resume looks like every other veteran SaaS CEO's resume - AppSense, 1E, Appboy (later Braze), Fuze, Bizzabo, ChartHop, Allbound, Jones - except for the line at the very top, which reads: officer, Royal Navy, nuclear submarines. He studied submarine nuclear reactor physics at the Royal Naval College Greenwich before he ever sold a seat license. This is not, in itself, an advantage in running a B2B software company. It is, however, an unusually specific fact about a person, and unusually specific facts about a person are always the most interesting thing about them.

The company he inherits is a vertical AI platform, which is a category of software product that has become fashionable to invest in. Vertical AI means: pick a boring workflow that a specific industry hates, replace the manual bits with a model, sell the whole thing to enterprises. Jones picked insurance verification for construction and real estate. A property owner requires every vendor, tenant and contractor to prove they carry insurance. Someone has to collect, validate and renew those certificates. Historically that someone was a person in a spreadsheet. Now it is Jones.

Whether Szemerenyi is the right person to scale this to its full potential is a bet the Jones board, its Series B investors, and its co-founder are collectively making. The evidence in favor is 20 years of running go-to-market at hyper-growth SaaS companies, one prior CEO seat at Allbound (a partner relationship management company he was reportedly a customer of before he ran it), and a personal history that suggests a certain tolerance for tight quarters, long deployments, and equipment that must not fail.

$38.4MTotal Raised

231Employees

2.7BSq Ft Under Risk

36k+Construction Projects

The Career

Twenty years of scaling revenue.

Read the resume backwards and forwards. It is a genre. Each stop is a hyper-growth B2B software company, and Szemerenyi arrives as the person responsible for turning a working product into a working business. AppSense in the late 2000s. 1E after that. Appboy (which would later become Braze). Fuze. Bizzabo. ChartHop. Allbound. Now Jones.

EARLY

Royal Navy officer, service on nuclear submarines. University of Surrey (BA Hons), Britannia Royal Naval College officer training, and Royal Naval College Greenwich for submarine nuclear reactor physics.

2007-2010

Vice President of Sales at AppSense, the endpoint management SaaS.

2010-2013

Vice President of Sales at 1E, running enterprise IT efficiency go-to-market.

2013-2014

Chief Revenue Officer at Appboy - later Braze - the mobile customer engagement platform now public.

2015-2019

Vice President of Sales at Fuze, the enterprise communications platform.

2019-2022

Chief Revenue Officer at Bizzabo, the events technology company.

2023-04

Appointed CEO of Allbound, the partner relationship management category leader. He had been a customer.

2026-01

Appointed CEO of Jones. Structured transition from co-founder Omri Stern through March 31, 2026.

Jones has built a category-defining AI platform that solves critical pain points for an entire industry. The company's combination of technical innovation, market leadership, and customer trust creates an extraordinary foundation.

— Paul Szemerenyi, on joining Jones, Jan 2026

The Company

What Jones actually does.

Jones automates the parts of insurance compliance that used to eat someone's Wednesday. Vendor prequalification. COI tracking. Bi-directional data flow between property managers, contractors, insurers and brokers. When a certificate expires, the system knows. When a policy has a gap, the system closes it. The pitch to a commercial real estate owner is that a spreadsheet with 4,000 rows becomes a workflow that runs itself.

The company was founded in 2017 and won that year's Kamet Incubation Program at the Insurtech Israel Startup Competition. Eight years later it is a New York SaaS company with a Series B, 231 employees, and offices in four countries. The customer base is measured in projects and square feet, both of which are large.

Szemerenyi's job is to take an AI product that a large set of construction and real estate operators already trust and turn it into a bigger business. This is the job he took at Allbound in 2023. Before Allbound it was the job he did at Bizzabo, Fuze, Appboy and everywhere else. What he is doing at Jones, in other words, is the same thing he has always done, in a different industry.

Scale, by number

Sq ft managed

2.7B

Projects

36k+

Employees

231

Offices

Total raised

$38.4M

The Company File

Founded2017, at Kamet Incubation
HQ11 W 25th St, New York
CategoryVertical AI, insurance verification
Latest round$15M Series B, Jan 2025
Total funding$38.4M
Employees231, four countries
FounderOmri Stern, now Board

The Details

Things that are true about him.

Fact 01

He studied nuclear reactor physics.

Not as a metaphor. As coursework at the Royal Naval College Greenwich, for the specific reason that he needed to run a submarine reactor.

Fact 02

He was a customer before he was CEO.

Before Allbound named him CEO in April 2023, he used the product. This is a rare data point in the resume of a professional SaaS operator.

Fact 03

Braze was called Appboy.

When Szemerenyi was CRO in 2013-2014, the company that would become a public customer engagement platform still had a mobile-first name. He was employee-era, not IPO-era.

Fact 04

Force Management certified.

The sales methodology, not the naval command. Also holds credentials in talent management. Both matter for building revenue orgs at scale.

Fact 05

Invictus Growth Partners Guild.

An operator network for scaling SaaS. Also advises RipeMetrics, Xtendlabs and CionSystems. Founded his own N7 Consulting practice.

Fact 06

Boring is a moat.

Insurance certificates and vendor prequalification are the least glamorous line items on a property manager's checklist. Jones's whole business is built on the boring.

In any market environment, channel sales often represent an enterprise's largest revenue driver.

— Paul Szemerenyi, on taking the Allbound CEO role, April 2023

The Pattern

What repeat CEOs actually carry between seats.

There is a version of Szemerenyi's story where the interesting part is the submarines, and there is a version where the interesting part is the SaaS. Both are interesting. The connective tissue is a pattern that shows up when you look at his companies together: each one had a working product and needed a working revenue machine, and each one hired him to build it. AppSense to 1E to Appboy to Fuze to Bizzabo. Then, in April 2023, Allbound handed him the whole company.

Now Jones. Same shape. Different vertical. Omri Stern and Michael, the technical co-founders, built the platform. The board, one year after a $15M Series B, decided the next chapter is a scaling chapter. The person who runs a scaling chapter is not usually the person who wrote the first line of code. It is usually someone who has run scaling chapters before, at Bizzabo or Braze or a place named after a Kubrick shot. Szemerenyi has run six.

The other thing worth noting is that Stern didn't leave. He moved to the board. The transition runs through March 31, 2026. That is a structured handoff, not a departure. Jones is not saying its founder was pushed out and Szemerenyi arrived to clean up. It is saying its founder decided the operating job is no longer the job he wants, and a professional CEO is. This is a mature signal from a growth-stage company. It is also the same signal Allbound sent in 2023 when Szemerenyi arrived there.

Reading between the lines of the two press releases - the 2023 Allbound one and the 2026 Jones one - the same words come up. Category-defining. World-class. Extraordinary foundation. This is boilerplate, and boilerplate is boring, but the fact that Szemerenyi is the person to whom the boilerplate is applied twice, in three years, is not boring. There are not many people currently walking around New York with two vertical-SaaS CEO seats and a nuclear submarine tour on the same resume.

FAQ

Common questions.

Who is Paul Szemerenyi?

A software executive appointed CEO of Jones in January 2026. Previously CEO of Allbound and Chief Revenue Officer at Bizzabo. Earlier career: Royal Navy officer serving on nuclear submarines.

What does Jones do?

Jones is a vertical AI platform for insurance verification in construction and real estate. Founded in 2017. Headquartered in New York. Manages compliance across 2.7 billion square feet and 36,000+ construction projects.

What companies has he worked at?

Allbound, Bizzabo, ChartHop, Fuze, Appboy/Braze, 1E and AppSense, in senior sales, CRO or CEO roles. He founded N7 Consulting and has advised RipeMetrics, Xtendlabs and CionSystems.

Where did he go to school?

University of Surrey (BA Hons), Britannia Royal Naval College for officer training, and Royal Naval College Greenwich for submarine nuclear reactor physics coursework.

When did he become CEO of Jones?

The appointment was announced on January 14-15, 2026. A structured transition from co-founder Omri Stern runs through March 31, 2026.

PaulSzemerenyi