Building Momentum: Welcoming Our Newest Executive Leaders Romain Seguy, CFO, and Joe Doran, CPO

Here at Botify, we’re thrilled to introduce you to our newest leaders helping steer the ship as we define what it means to lead in the era of agentic commerce. After an exciting 2025 with so much transformation in AI search, it’s been our goal to fortify our momentum with people that bring vast experience, future-forward ideas, and incredible eagerness to prioritize our customers’ success.

Welcoming new leadership to usher in a new era

In the second half of 2025, as part of our renewed mission to support our customers through these many changes, we brought some of the industry’s most accomplished strategic minds to help answer the defining question: How can brands ensure they’re found in AI search? 

The leaders we’ve recently welcomed bring decades of experience from the forefront of technology, advertising, enterprise SaaS, and digital marketing. Each of them offers a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities our customers currently face, and everyone is deeply committed to delivering solutions that create demonstrable impact. 

Without further adieu, please join us in welcoming: 

Romain Seguy, CFO

Romain brings decades of finance leadership experience from companies at the cutting edge of technology, specifically in cybersecurity, gaming, and SaaS. His track record centers on balancing aggressive growth with financial discipline, a combination that will be essential as Botify scales our AI search solutions. 

“I joined Botify because it brings together strong growth ambition with real financial discipline,” Romain explains. “Botify over the last decade has built a differentiated enterprise platform in the search market, with a clear focus on scalable and sustainable value creation. I was impressed by the quality of the leadership and investor team, as well as the rigor of its execution. As AI is reshaping the search landscape and raising new challenges for enterprises, my background is particularly relevant to help Botify navigate this next phase and support profitable growth for both customers and investors.”

Romain’s expertise in guiding technology companies through periods of rapid change will be instrumental as we expand our platform capabilities, while maintaining the financial sustainability that enables us to serve our customers for years to come. 

Joe Doran, CPO

With over 25 years of experience building highly-scaled advertising and paid media platforms for some of the world’s largest video and search companies, Joe understands the search landscape from every angle. As a founding member of the paid search platform within Microsoft, he’s witnessed firsthand how search evolves, and, more importantly, what it takes for businesses to adapt successfully. 

For the past 15 years, Joe has brought that enterprise perspective to the startup world, scaling companies in the billion-dollar range, understanding that success in the era of agentic search requires both strategic vision and operational agility. 

“I joined Botify because it has a unique opportunity to lead the next era of AI search and agentic commerce,” Joe says. “Having built and scaled data-driven, AI-powered platforms across enterprise SaaS and digital marketing, I’m excited to help evolve the industry’s leading organic search platform into the definitive AI search platform — delivering measurable business outcomes for Fortune 500 brands. Botify’s talent, technology, and ambition set it apart.”

Joe’s deep expertise in search positions him perfectly to guide Botify’s product evolution. He understands what customers need today, as well as how to build platforms by anticipating where the industry is going. 

Strengthening our leadership bench

Supporting our executive team, we’ve also fostered exceptional talent at the VP level, focused on growth and customer success: 

Ilana Goddess, VP of Product Marketing

With more than 15 years of experience leading marketing initiatives in the B2B SaaS space, Ilana has built her career on turning complex technology into compelling stories. Her experience spans the full spectrum of marketing leadership, from product positioning and competitive analysis to customer advocacy. Ilana’s expertise in marketing AI-powered products is particularly timely for Botify, as she knows how to take highly technical concepts that can often sound abstract or feel overwhelming and synthesize them into actionable insights.

“As the future of search is being completely reshaped, Botify’s product vision feels bold and deeply relevant,” Ilana shares. “I’m excited to help translate that vision into a compelling story that delivers real value for our customers."

Brandon Lytle, VP of Partnerships

“As discoverability enters a new era, Botify is at the forefront of shaping how brands win,” says our new VP of Partnerships, Brandon Lytle. “We have a unique opportunity to build a partner ecosystem that drives customer impact and fuels the next wave of growth.”

Brandon is well positioned to take advantage of that opportunity, as he brings over 15 years of partnership and strategic alliance experience to the table from across a range of digital solutions brands. 

Ryan Locks, VP of Strategic Growth

Ryan’s promotion to VP of Strategic Growth recognizes the exceptional impact he’s made working with Botify’s largest retail and e-commerce clients. His new role centers on the challenge many global brands will now face: maintaining visibility and driving revenue as search continues to grow and fracture across an ever-expanding ecosystem of traditional and AI platforms. His deep understanding of how AI-powered search impacts the ecosystem and business outcomes will help us build solutions for the future. 

“I’m excited to take on the role of Vice President of Strategic Growth and continue partnering with some of the world’s most ambitious brands,” Ryan shares. “We’re entering a transformative era defined by agentic commerce and generative AI. I'm energized by the opportunity to help companies not just adapt to this shift, but navigate it strategically, turning it into a major competitive advantage.”

Expanding our expertise with strategic advisors

We’re rounding out our new, all-star team by welcoming new advisors into our leadership circle, including renowned industry expert Rob Garf. Rob lends his unique perspective from his deep experience across every side of the retail and consumer goods industry, helping us distill vast amounts of data into actionable, sustainable insights for our customers to use.

"AI is ... on pace to have more impact, and disruption, for retailers than the Internet and the Cloud," Rob predicts. "Executives I talk to everyday are grappling with not only technology adoption, but organizational skills, processes, and structure required to optimize what’s arguably the greatest innovation of our lifetime."

We're certain Rob will be pivotal to making our mission — to give every brand the power to be found everywhere, by consumers, bots, and AI agents — a success.

Looking to the future with Botify

As we grow this momentum, we’ll continue to build sophisticated product solutions and strategies, supported by an even deeper well of subject matter expertise. 

We couldn’t be more delighted to welcome such incredible talent to the Botify team. These experts have chosen to join us at a vitally exciting time, as we reinforce our commitment to helping our customers win visibility on the agentic web and grow sustainable revenue.