Reed Overfelt

Reed Overfelt sells the plumbing. Not the AI. The pipes that make the AI mean anything. He is the chief executive officer of Black Tiger, a data platform with a New York address at 11 East 44th Street, roughly a hundred and fifty employees, an unusually strong center of gravity in France, and a fifteen-point-nine-five million dollar Series A that closed in the winter of 2023. His job, most days, is to walk into a conference room somewhere in enterprise America and explain, patiently, that the reason the last AI pilot did not work is that the customer table has the same person in it four times.

This is not a glamorous pitch. It is, however, a durable one. Overfelt has been running variations of it for most of a decade. Before Black Tiger, he was the chief executive of FEV Tutor, a K through twelve personalized-tutoring business. Before that he was group chief executive of Redwood Software, an automation company that lists more than eight thousand customers on its books. Before that he was the chief growth officer of Aurea Software, which is a holding structure for a portfolio of enterprise applications most technology reporters will never write about. Before that, farther back, he was the chief executive or founder of a string of smaller ventures - WishWould, FullQuota, Penrocket, OptimizedNow, and an operating role at SMBLive that ended in an acquisition by ReachLocal. And before all of that he spent a decade as a General Manager at Microsoft, from 1997 to 2007, which is the sort of tenure that shows up on his LinkedIn in one line and shapes the following twenty years of his career in ways that don't.

What connects the roles is a preference. Overfelt likes companies whose primary product is helping other companies understand what they already have. He likes data, in the specific sense of the noun a chief information officer uses when they sigh. He has apparently decided this is a good business to be in, and he keeps being proven right.

The Black Tiger bet

Black Tiger is, in the company's own language, an AI-powered platform that unites modern master data management with data governance. In less encumbered language, it is a piece of software you install between all of your other software so that when you ask a question - "who are our top customers," say, or "how many suppliers do we actually have" - you get one answer instead of seven. The keyword list Overfelt inherited from marketing runs to hundreds of terms. Data quality. Data lineage. GDPR. Datawarehouse. Datalake. Virtual index. Low-code interface. Custom API connectors. The list is long the way a hardware store is long. Different customers need different aisles.

The company was founded and grew up in France. The keyword "editeur de logiciel" - French for software publisher - is still in the copy. Its French operating entity reported roughly 4.82 million euros of turnover in the balance sheet published for the year ending December 31, 2024. The New York headquarters and the American CEO are, in that sense, a chapter, not the whole story. This is a European data company acquiring an American accent, and Overfelt is the accent.

A ten-year Microsoft habit

Overfelt joined Microsoft in September 1997 and left in September 2007, ten years almost exactly. In his own summary he uses the phrase "drove the creation of several multi-billion dollar market categories," and lists cloud infrastructure-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, inbound marketing, and big data analytics. The claim is broad enough to be uncheckable, which is a normal feature of executive bios, but the specifics that do check out are worth noticing. He was a keynote speaker at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference in both 2012 and 2013 - years after he left the company, which means Microsoft's partner org kept inviting him back. That is not a common trajectory. Most former GMs disappear into their next roles quietly.

There is also a Presidential Management Fellowship from 1991 in his record, which places him inside the federal government early in his career, a small biographical detail that suggests a person who at one point considered doing something other than shipping enterprise software for a living. He apparently decided against it.

The pattern in the roles

If you line up his post-Microsoft chief-executive stops - Aurea, Redwood, GAN Integrity, FEV Tutor, Black Tiger - the pattern is legible. He shows up at private-equity-adjacent enterprise software businesses where someone has decided the product is basically right and the go-to-market is basically wrong. He has been an operating executive at Alpine Investors, which is one of the private-equity firms that specializes in exactly this kind of surgery. The Overfelt playbook, to the extent one can be inferred from public posts and press releases, involves listening a lot, cutting narrative clutter, and moving faster on the sales floor. In a 2024 podcast appearance on Power to Sell, he did an episode titled "Power of Listening," which is a slightly on-the-nose theme for a career built on making noisy data legible.

What he actually writes about

Overfelt writes, publicly and often, about a narrow set of topics. His byline runs on the Black Tiger blog and on LinkedIn. In July 2025 he published "AI Is Only As Good As Your Master Data," an argument that runs, in short, as follows: everyone wants to run AI models across the enterprise, the models are increasingly commoditized, the differentiator is the data underneath, and the data underneath is a wreck. In August 2025 he followed up with "Enterprise Data Governance: Meeting the Expectations of Regulators and Boards," which pushed the same argument into compliance-flavored language. In June 2026 he published "AI Is Changing the Enterprise. How Do You Lead Now?" which is a slight expansion into leadership territory.

Read together, the pieces are less thought leadership than a single thought, repeated. That is a decision, not an accident. Overfelt appears to have concluded that repeating one clear idea to the right audience is worth more than diversifying into ten muddier ones. This is also, incidentally, the recommended approach for master data management, which is about picking one authoritative record and getting everyone else to agree.

A short career timeline

The University of Montana detail

His public education line reads University of Montana, no degree specified. That places his undergraduate years in Missoula, which is a nontrivial fact when the rest of the resume is Manhattan, Redmond, Austin, Morristown, and Washington. Software careers written up in press tend to compress along a coast. Overfelt's does not. There is a Missoula-to-Redmond-to-Manhattan arc buried in his profile, which is worth noticing on its own terms even if it never comes up in a keynote. He speaks English and Spanish. That is on his profile too.

The through-line

Every enterprise-software cycle produces one or two ideas that were unfashionable while they mattered and became obvious afterward. Overfelt is betting that master data management is one of those. It is not a new discipline. The category has existed since roughly the mid-2000s and has been declared uninteresting by industry analysts on a rotating basis ever since. Then generative AI happened, and the customer data problem stopped being an IT hygiene issue and became a boardroom issue, because chief executives started asking why their AI copilots kept giving confidently wrong answers about their own customers. The answer, in most cases, was that the underlying data was fragmented across a dozen systems that spelled the same customer differently.

Black Tiger sells the fix. Overfelt sells Black Tiger. The rest of the strategy is execution, which is what he has spent the last twenty years doing at companies you might not otherwise notice. That is the story. It does not require a hero shot. It requires, mainly, patience, a keyword list that could fill a dictionary, and the willingness to say "AI is only as good as your master data" in every room for the next three years.

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