qualified
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Maura Rivera Taught the Website to Answer Back - Then Taught Marketing to Hire AI
At Qualified, Maura Rivera turned product launches into an operating rhythm, built a team that stayed, and helped move B2B marketing from forms and follow-up to coached AI agents. Then the company returned to where her career began: Salesforce.
Kraig Swensrud
Kraig Swensrud is the co-founder and CEO of Qualified, the AI-powered pipeline generation platform built natively on Salesforce. A serial entrepreneur and former Salesforce CMO, he has founded three companies - Kieden (acquired by Salesforce in 2006), GetFeedback (acquired by Campaign Monitor in 2014, later by SurveyMonkey), and Qualified (acquired by Salesforce in April 2026 for an estimated multi-hundred million valuation). At Qualified, he built the category of conversational marketing and agentic AI for B2B enterprises, raising $163M in funding and growing to ~260 employees before the acquisition completed a full-circle return to Salesforce.
Sean Whiteley
Sean Whiteley is a three-time enterprise software founder and President of Qualified, the AI pipeline generation platform he co-built with long-time partner Kraig Swensrud. Having navigated every major tech platform shift - from on-premise to cloud to AI - across a 30-year career that includes stints at AOL, PwC, PeopleSoft, webMethods, and Salesforce, Sean brings rare pattern recognition to go-to-market strategy. His companies have a track record of building deep inside the Salesforce ecosystem and exiting to strategic acquirers: Kieden to Salesforce (2006), GetFeedback to SurveyMonkey (2019), and now Qualified to Salesforce again (2025), in a deal that cements his legacy as one of enterprise software's most consistent repeat founders.