Dec 20, 2022

Lease Crutcher Lewis

General contractor Lease Crutcher Lewis promoted Jeff Cleator to chief operating officer and Jay Sorensen to Washington Division president; and hired Tony Stewart as Oregon president. Cleator joined the company in 1987 as an intern and has advanced in his career at Lewis, serving as Commercial Division manager, vice president and, since 2016, Washington Division president. He serves on the board of directors for ANEW and the Runstad Department of Real Estate at the University of Washington, and is a former board member for Virginia Mason Medical Center. Sorensen joined Lewis in 1997 and has since served as project manager, senior project manager, Special Projects Division manager and, since 2016, senior vice president. The company says he has played a critical role in workforce development, recruitment and the company's diversity, equity and inclusion initiative. Stewart has over 30 years of experience leading teams across multiple disciplines including construction, architecture, real estate and specialty contracting. He is DBIA certified, a licensed architect and most recently served as vice president at Skanska in Seattle, where he led the firm's design and construction integration practice.

UMC

Mukilteo-based UMC hired Griffin Brady, TJ Watanabe, Matty Hicks and Mason Chaussee as project managers in the Special Projects Group. They are responsible for managing projects, acting as single points of contact for clients, and bringing their projects in on time and on budget. Kamil Ettaki and Colin Helgeson, EIT, also joined the group as project engineers to support the project managers with submittals, RFIs, creating new business proposals, and vendor communication.

McKinstry

Construction and energy services firm McKinstry promoted Matt Allen to chief client officer, where he will work in tandem with the company's partners and project teams to support innovation and project excellence. Allen started his McKinstry career as an intern working in finance and later moved into roles as a project manager and director of construction technology. He most recently was project executive for Spokane developments that include the Health Partnership Building, McKinstry Spokane manufacturing facility, and tenant improvement projects on the South Landing campus. In addition, he was appointed to McKinstry's board earlier this year.

Appen Limited

as chief executive officer and president of the company, effective from no later than 30 January 2023. Ahmad will also serve as managing director. Appen's current CEO and managing director, Mark Brayan, will remain with the business until February 28, 2023 to ensure a smooth transition. Armughan brings over 25 years of global experience in the technology industry having led product, sales, and services organizations at KPMG, Dell Technologies, and Hewlett Packard in the past. He was most recently president and managing partner of digital at KPMG in Canada. Armughan will be based out of Appen's offices in North America. Appen is a global provider of data for the AI Lifecycle. Founded in 1996, Appen has customers and offices globally, and maintains its United States headquarters in Kirkland.

F5

Seattle-based F5 appointed Kara Sprague to the newly created role of chief product officer. In this role, Sprague will oversee F5's entire portfolio of multi-cloud application security and delivery solutions, with a focus on expanding SaaS offerings on the F5 Distributed Cloud Platform and enabling organizations to streamline application security and delivery operations across their complex application environments. Sprague joined F5 in 2017 to lead the Application Delivery Controller business. In her most recent role, she served as executive vice president, Application Delivery and Enterprise Product Ops, where she was responsible for the BIG-IP and NGINX product families, along with enterprise-wide product operations.

Protect AI

Protect AI, a cybersecurity company focused on the security of artificial intelligence and machine learning systems, emerged from stealth with $13.5 million seed funding and its first product, NB Defense. The free product is the industry's security solution to address vulnerabilities in a core component used at the beginning of the machine learning supply chain – Jupyter Notebooks. The company was founded by a leadership team who have led AI businesses from AWS and Oracle, with track records of creating new market categories and launching successful startups in the ML space. The round was co-led by cybersecurity investors Acrew Capital and boldstart ventures. Additional investors include Knollwood Capital, Pelion Ventures, Avisio Ventures, and cybersecurity leaders Shlomo Kramer, Nir Polak and Dimitri Sirota. It was also announced that Mark Kraynak and Ed Sim joined the Protect AI Board of Directors. The privately-held company is based in Seattle, with offices in Dallas and Raleigh.

Dec 16, 2022

NuScale Power

NuScale Power named Karin Feldman interim chief operating officer/chief nuclear officer, effective Jan. 6. Current COO/CNO, Dale Atkinson, will retire on Jan. 5, after more than eight years with NuScale. As interim COO/CNO, Feldman will have full responsibility for the operations, engineering, program management, quality assurance, information technology, and regulatory affairs functions and will report to John Hopkins, NuScale's president and CEO. Feldman joined NuScale in 2012 and presently serves as vice president, program management office, and is responsible for establishing and maintaining project management, project controls, cost estimating, and risk management standards. She is the primary NuScale interface for U.S. Department of Energy cooperative agreement management and is responsible for the development and oversight of the NuScale project portfolio. Feldman will maintain these duties while she assumes the role of interim COO/CNO. Prior to NuScale, Feldman spent over a decade in the aerospace industry supporting program development activities for next-generation space and launch systems. Founded in 2007, NuScale is headquartered in Portland, and has offices in Corvallis, Oregon; Rockville, Maryland; Richland; and London.

Standard Insurance

Standard Insurance (The Standard) announced that Jon Shervey has been promoted to second vice president for customer service in Employee Benefits. Shervey joined The Standard in 2003 and has held various roles in Employee Benefits National Accounts, including proposals and new customer implementation. Shervey has also led a team focused on scaling The Standard's market presence in the small employer segment. In his new role, he'll lead a cross-functional team dedicated to providing employee benefits to the company's largest group customer as well as small group customers. Additionally, Jessica Krpan is joining the company as second vice president of business integration for its Retirement Plans business. Krpan will lead the team charged with incorporating The Standard's recent acquisition of Securian Financial's recordkeeping business. Prior to joining The Standard, Krpan spent more than 17 years in finance, innovation and strategy roles at Allstate Insurance. The Standard, headquartered in Portland, has been in business since 1906, and provides financial products and services for groups and individuals.

Spaceflight

Global launch services provider Spaceflight announced it's preparing its final launch of 2022. Spaceflight provided the launch and integration services for Kleos Space's fourth satellite cluster, Observer, through ISISPACE Group on SpaceX's Transporter 6 rideshare mission. The four Kleos spacecraft are heading to a 525-kilometer sun synchronous orbit aboard a Falcon 9 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. This launch represents Spaceflight's 55th launch since its inception. With the Transporter 6 mission, Spaceflight will have completed 10 missions in 2022, including the successful debut launches of its experimental OTV for hosted payloads, Sherpa-AC in May, and its chemical propulsion OTV Sherpa-LTC in September. Earlier this year, Spaceflight celebrated a major milestone – its 50th mission, which flew aboard a Rocket Lab Electron, and moved into a new 39,000-square-foot office headquarters and state-of-the-art integration facility space in Bellevue. In 2023, Spaceflight plans to execute 10-15 missions and work with more launch vehicle providers to launch customer payloads to their desired orbital destinations. Based in Seattle, Spaceflight has successfully launched hundreds of satellites and is a part of the Mitsui & Co. portfolio, operating as an independent, U.S.-based company.