Sean Kae

Modo Labs sells you a building. Or a campus. Or a hospital - rendered as a mobile app you actually open. Sean Kae has been running the company since August 2022, and the pitch is deceptively simple: the dorm and the corner office have the same problem. Find a room. Find a person. Find the thing you need before the meeting starts.

Kae came in as Chief Operating Officer. He was promoted to CEO within months. The interim CEO and founder, Andrew Yu, stepped back into the President role on the same day. It was less a coup than a relay handoff, the kind that happens when a founder wants to keep building product and the board wants someone who has run a P&L at scale.

Kae had run plenty. Sixteen-plus years at Samsung - first as an operational executive in the Mobile and IT Services divisions, then leading Strategy and Corporate Development at the Samsung Strategy and Innovation Center, the company's bet-on-the-future arm. SSIC's brief was 5G, AI, robotics, digital health, autonomous vehicles. The kind of portfolio where most of what you look at never ships and the things that do change everything.

From the company IBM bought.

Before Samsung, Kae was an early employee at Rational Software - the company that gave the world UML and a generation of software engineers their first serious modeling tools. IBM acquired Rational in 2003. Kae stayed on as a Regional Manager, running the Western US sales organization. It was his first lesson in what happens when a small, opinionated company gets folded into a very large one. He has been operating on that scale ever since.

Why a campus app company is also a workplace app company.

This is the bet. Modo Labs started in higher ed - the platform was born out of MIT and originally built mobile experiences for universities. Students want a single app for the bus schedule, the cafeteria menu, the library hours, and their class roster. Employees want exactly the same thing: a single app for the meeting room, the desk reservation, the cafeteria menu, the directory.

Kae's job is to point this out loudly enough that enterprise buyers stop building it themselves and customers in healthcare and real estate start looking at Modo the same way universities already do. The keywords on his sales sheet read like a hybrid-work bingo card: smart hoteling, indoor wayfinding, visitor management, digital ID, space utilization analytics, IoT integration. None of these are individually a product. Together, in a no-code builder, they are a platform.

The VC year.

Before Modo, Kae spent time as an Executive in Residence at Storm Ventures, a Silicon Valley enterprise-software fund. EIR is the title you take when you are between things and looking for the right thing. He kept the operator's habit and added an investor's pattern-matching. Modo, with a real product and real customers but a need for a growth engine, fit the brief.

He was named CEO on August 5, 2022. In August 2023, Modo closed a round of debt financing - part of a $32.55M total stack - and kept building. The headcount sits at 86. The customer list runs from universities to hospitals to corporate workplaces. The company has been around long enough to be unfashionable and short enough to still be hungry.

Two degrees, one thesis.

Kae has a Bachelor of Arts from Cornell and a Master of Science from Johns Hopkins. The thesis, if you read it across the arc of his career, is consistent: software gets interesting when it touches a building. Mobile gets interesting when it replaces a binder, a badge, a help desk, a clipboard. The campus is the easiest place to prove it because students complain on Twitter. The enterprise is the most lucrative place to sell it because procurement does not.

What he is doing now.

The current Modo Labs is wider than the one he inherited. The website tags read like a roadmap: AI agent support, no-code app builder, role-based personalization, real-time notifications, cloud-based deployment, integrations and APIs, enterprise-grade security. The pitch is that an organization with thousands of people and dozens of systems can ship a branded, secure, role-aware mobile app without a mobile team. That is a deeply boring sentence and a deeply valuable product.

Kae himself is not loud about it. There is no podcast tour, no manifesto on Medium, no public Twitter. There is a LinkedIn page, a press release, and a quarterly customer logo announcement. The work is the work. The campus is the workplace. The phone is the door.