automotive-software
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Kenji Nakashima and the last turn before arrival
From Oracle and Google Cloud to Applied Intuition, Kenji Nakashima has spent his career bringing software into Japan’s automotive business. His current work reaches a particularly revealing destination: the loading bay.
Alexis Cardona Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Businesses Mean Something
After Procter & Gamble, Transitions Optical, Aspen Dental and a seven-and-a-half-year run helping SpinCar become Impel, the percussionist with 6,000 CDs has taken on a new score at KPA: translating four decades of trust into an automotive software story.
Albert Lilly Has Spent a Career Making Complicated Technology Make Sense
From online compliance courses to cars that update overnight, the Sibros CMO has built a career around a deceptively hard task: translating complex systems into useful stories.
John Heinlein Learned to Market the Machine
A Stanford-trained computer architect became a marketer without abandoning the engineer in him. At Sonatus, John Heinlein now makes the case that a car should improve long after it leaves the factory.
Lei Xu Is Teaching Cars to See - Then Asking What Sight Is For
The former Tesla Vision engineer built Nullmax around a stubbornly practical idea: autonomous driving only matters when the software can leave the demo, fit the car and survive the road.
Peter Duffy Put the Car Lot Inside a Viewfinder
He began with a camera, a route of dealerships and a problem hiding in plain sight. Fourteen years later, Peter Duffy's guide lines have become an operating system for getting vehicles seen - and sold.
Seve Astorg Put the Receipts in the Sales Pitch
A paper packet inside a West Virginia dealership became a software company. Seve Astorg’s enduring idea is disarmingly practical: when a car comes with proof, the conversation changes.
Joseph Burke
Joseph Burke is the co-founder and CEO of Ottometric, a Waltham, Massachusetts software company that automates the validation of Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and autonomous-vehicle software. An engineer by training who entered the ADAS field in 2010 building radar and blind-spot detection for an airbag maker, Burke started Ottometric in 2019 to attack a brutal industry problem: validating a single vehicle model can cost automakers over $100 million and take more than a year. Ottometric's platform uses proprietary data-distillation technology to turn oceans of raw sensor data into structured safety insights, cutting validation cost and time by more than half. The company has raised roughly $14.9 million, including a $10 million Series A in April 2025.
Kevin Singerman
Kevin Singerman is the CEO and Co-Founder of AutoFi, a San Francisco-based automotive fintech company he co-founded in 2015 with Mandar Gokhale and Jonathan T. Palan. AutoFi has become a leading end-to-end automotive sales and financing platform, processing over 1 million financing requests and $3+ billion in vehicle sales annually, backed by $125M+ in funding including an $85M Series C at a $700M valuation. Singerman built his career at the intersection of finance and technology, with stints at Deutsche Bank, SunGard, Stephens Inc., and LendingClub before launching AutoFi to transform how cars are bought and sold.
Jeffrey Chou
Jeffrey Chou is the CEO and co-founder of Sonatus, the Sunnyvale-based company building AI-powered software-defined vehicle platforms for the automotive industry. A serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur with a track record of exits to Cisco and Brocade, Chou co-founded Sonatus in 2018 with Yu Fang, applying datacenter-era thinking to automobiles. Under his leadership, Sonatus has raised over $110 million, won the 2022 PACE Innovation Partnership Award with Hyundai, and deployed its platform across more than 6 million production vehicles globally from Genesis, Hyundai, and Kia.
Carsten Helbing
Carsten Helbing is the COO and Co-CEO of Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, the $5.8 billion joint venture headquartered in Palo Alto that is building the software and electrical architecture stack for a new generation of software-defined vehicles. A mechanical engineer by training who spent more than two decades at Volkswagen - rising from graduate engineer to Group Chief Technology Engineer - Helbing now leads a ~1,500-person organisation alongside Rivian co-CEO Wassym Bensaid, bridging German engineering discipline with Silicon Valley's software-first culture to redefine how cars are built, updated, and experienced.
Lei Zhang
Lei Zhang is the CEO of CARIAD, Inc., Volkswagen Group's U.S. automotive software subsidiary based in Mountain View, California. A seasoned technology executive with 16+ years spanning Microsoft, Google, Huami, and NIO, Zhang now leads CARIAD's Interior, Infotainment & Digital Experience division globally. Known for pioneering NIO's NOMI digital assistant and championing software-defined vehicle innovation, he earned MotorTrend's Software-Defined Vehicle Innovator Award in 2023. His work sits at the intersection of Android OS expertise, AI-driven user experience, and the fast-evolving world of connected, electric mobility.