
After helping software watch itself at Facebook and SignalFx, the engineer-founder is applying the same continuous logic to the paperwork, judgment calls and recurring anxiety of corporate compliance.
Karthik Rau is the CEO of Contentful, the Berlin-based composable content platform. A Stanford-trained industrial engineer, he founded the cloud-monitoring company SignalFx (acquired by Splunk for $1.05B in 2019) and earlier helped lead VMware through its 2007 IPO. He took the helm at Contentful in April 2024 to push it from headless CMS into an AI-era content platform.