Sandeep Dadlani
Sandeep Dadlani was elected to our Board in March of 2021. Mr. Dadlani serves as a member of the Governance, Nominating and Sustainability Committee and the Market Development Committee. Mr. Dadlani joined Mars, Incorporated, a $40 billion global conglomerate in the petcare, food and confectionary businesses, as Global Chief Digital Officer in September 2017, where part of his responsibilities focused on the digitalization of the supply chain for Mars. He works with Mars' global business segments to drive their digital growth, while delivering effectiveness and efficiency to existing business and technology platforms. He focuses on consumer centricity, the power of data, analytics, artificial intelligence, and automation, driving new digital platforms, e-commerce, D2C business models, and new agile digital behaviors across the enterprise. Mr. Dadlani has won several awards, including CIO of the Year in 2019 by Consumer Goods Technology, one of the top 150 business transformation leaders
globally by Constellation Research, and Blue Yonder’s 50 most prominent AI thought leaders in 2021. Prior to joining Mars, Mr. Dadlani was with Infosys (NYSE: INFY) from 2001 to 2017. From January 2016 until his departure in September of 2017, he was President, Head of Americas and Global Head of Infosys's Manufacturing, Retail, Consumer Packaged Goods and Logistic Practices. He co-founded and eventually ran as Chairman Infosys Edgeverve, a new artificial intelligence company for Infosys, and
Skava, a mobile commerce company. Prior to his employment with Infosys, he began his career in investment banking at Citibank.
Mr. Dadlani has more than 24 years of experience in transformation, operations, consulting, business development and product management. He has been a contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Forbes, WSJ, and Consumer Goods Technology, and is a regular keynote speaker at industry forums. He has co-authored the UN Global report on supply chain sustainability. Additionally, he is on the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Consumption and has participated for several years in the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos. Mr. Dadlani earned a B.E. degree (electrical engineering) from M.S. University, Baroda, India and an MBA (in finance) from JBIMS, Mumbai University, India. He has completed significant executive certifications at INSEAD and Singularity University. He brings product management, operations, digital and technology platforms, data management, artificial intelligence, mobile commerce, e-commerce, platform automation, supply chain digitalization, and international experience to Digimarc. Mr. Dadlani was referred to the Governance, Nominating and Sustainability Committee by Mr. Walter, a member of the Board of Directors.
Ravi Kumar
Ravi Kumar was elected to our Board of Directors in June 2021. Mr. Kumar has over 19 years of experience in the consulting space, incubating new practice lines, driving large transformational programs, and evangelizing new business models across industry segments. He is President at Infosys, a leading global IT consulting and services company, where he leads the Global Services Organization across all industry segments. He drives digital transformation, consulting, traditional technology and engineering services, along with the data and analytics, cloud and infrastructure, and enterprise package application service lines. He serves as Chairman of the Board of Infosys Business Process Management (BPM). Mr. Kumar also oversees Infosys Public Services and the consulting services subsidiary of Infosys. He chairs the Boards of the digital companies Kaleidoscope, Guidevision, Wongdoody and Simplus that Infosys has acquired. He also manages Infosys business in Latin America, Japan and China. He has played diverse roles across organizations within the CRM space for Oracle Corporation, building a next-generation CRM practice at Cambridge Technology Partners. He has also worked on process and technology transformation for the unbundling of Indian State Electricity Boards at PricewaterhouseCoopers.
Mr. Kumar is on the Board of Governors of the New York Academy of Sciences and the Board of AdvanceCT-Economic Dev Board of the State of Connecticut. He earned a B.S. from Shivaji University and a M.B.A. from Xavier Institute of Management.
Riley McCormack
Mr. McCormack is the founder of TCM|Strategic, a fund that recently invested $53.5 million in the Company. Previously Mr. McCormack was the founder, CEO and PM of Tracer Capital Management, a $1.5 billion New York-based global Technology, Media and Telecommunication Hedge Fund. Prior to Tracer, he was a partner at Coatue Capital and a high-yield research analyst at Morgan Stanley, covering media and telecom companies.
James Richardson
James T. Richardson was elected to our Board of Directors in March 2003. Mr. Richardson is a director of and consultant to companies in the high-technology sector and has served as chief financial officer and chief administrative officer for five global technology companies ranging in size from $20 million to $300 million in annual revenue. Functional responsibilities have included controllership, treasury, corporate communications, operations, business development (mergers & acquisitions), information systems, human resources and legal affairs. His most recent executive post was as senior vice president and chief financial officer at WebTrends Corp., now a division of NetIQ (Nasdaq: NTIQ), from July 1998 to April 2001. Prior to that, he was senior vice president - corporate operations and chief financial officer at Network General Corporation (which has since merged with McAfee to form Network Associates) from April 1994 to January 1998; vice president finance and administration and chief financial officer at Logic Modeling Corp. (which has since been acquired by Synopsys) from July 1992 to March 1994; vice president finance and administration and chief financial officer at Advanced Logic Research, Inc. (which has since been acquired by Gateway) from November 1989 to July 1992; and similar posts in finance.
Mr. Richardson previously served as a member of the Boards of Directors for three other companies, including FEI Company (audit committee chair), Plumtree Software (compensation committee chair, audit committee member), and Tripwire, a Portland, Oregon-based network security company (audit committee chair). Mr. Richardson received a B.A. in finance and accounting from Lewis and Clark College, an M.B.A. from the University of Portland, and a J.D. from the Lewis and Clark Law School. He graduated from Stanford Directors' College in 2001 and is both a C.P.A. and attorney in Oregon.
Alicia Syrett - Board Chair
Alicia Syrett was elected to our Board of Directors in October 2020, and was elected Chair of the Board in April 2020. Ms. Syrett serves as a member of the Audit Committee, Compensation Committee, Governance, Nominating and Sustainability Committee, and Market Development Committee and serves as the Chair of the Governance, Nominating and Sustainability Committee. Ms. Syrett brings more than 20 years of investment management experience to the Digimarc Board. She is currently the Chief Executive Officer of Pantegrion Capital, an investment management firm she founded in 2011. She is an accomplished author, speaker, and regular media personality on major cable and network news and financial programs. Before Pantegrion, Ms. Syrett was the Chief Administrative Officer and Managing Director of Mount Kellett, a multi-billion-dollar investment firm acquired by Fortress Investment Group. Between 2002 and 2008, she served as a Director at HBK Investments and as Chief Administrative Officer at Farallon Capital, one of the country’s largest hedge funds. She began her career at Donaldson, Lufkin, & Jenrette in investment banking. Ms. Syrett currently serves on the boards of NewAge, Inc. (NASDAQ: NBEV), the New York Tech Alliance, and EnerKnol, an innovative energy policy and data analytics company. Ms. Syrett holds an MBA from both Columbia Business School where she received Beta Gamma Sigma honors and the London Business School where she graduated with distinction (top 10%) and holds a bachelor’s degree in economics with concentrations in finance and accounting from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated magna cum laude. Ms. Syrett is a Board Leadership Fellow certified by the National Association of Corporate Directors (NACD).
Ms. Syrett brings executive, human capital management, financial, compensation and operational expertise to the Board of Directors. Ms. Syrett is accomplished across many disciplines with extraordinary leadership qualities, a history of investing in and advising hyper-scale growth organizations, a track record of advocating for diversity and equality, and a mastery of modern media. She is an accomplished venture capitalist, author, instructor at Columbia University, public speaker and has been a regular guest on various financial network television shows. Ms. Syrett is also a highly sought-after advisor to startups, early-stage, hyper-growth companies, and women-led organizations. Her experience is particularly germane to Digimarc initiatives to increase diversity and inclusion at all levels of the Company and improve the Company’s compensation program, succession planning, corporate governance, sustainability and Board and personnel recruitment initiatives.
Andrew Walter
Andrew J. Walter was elected to our Board of Directors in October 2016. Mr. Walter serves as a member of the Audit Committee and the Market Development Committee and serves as the Chair of the Market Development Committee. Mr. Walter has more than 30 years of operations, information technology and shared services experience, including 26 years at The Procter & Gamble Company (NYSE: PG), a consumer goods company. Mr. Walter has served on a number of boards, including the GS1 US Board of Governors, an organization that develops and maintains global standards for business communication, and as Chair for its technology committee. He is currently serving as an advisory board member or strategic advisor for various privately held technology companies and as Trustee and Vice Chair for the Ovarian Cancer Alliance of Greater Cincinnati. Mr. Walter received his B.C.S. from the University of Cincinnati.
Mr. Walter brings strategic, international, operational and digital transformation expertise to the Board of Directors. Prior to joining our Board, Mr. Walter enjoyed a long tenure at Procter & Gamble, where he most recently led its Global Business Services and IT Global Commercial Services and Delivery organization until August 2016, with more than 1,500 IT and multifunctional professionals and more than 5,000 partner resources. He has deep expertise in integration of emerging and core commercial technologies, supply chain management, sales and marketing, and consumer and business analytics.
Sheela Zemlin
Sheela Zemlin was elected to our Board of Directors in February 2021. Ms. Zemlin brings more than 20 years of executive management, sales, software and customer success experience to the Digimarc Board. Sheela is the EVP and Chief Revenue Officer for Bakkt, a consumer digital assets and institutional cryptocurrency custody platform company. From 2018 to 2021, she served as the Chief Revenue Officer and Partner for PwC New Ventures in San Francisco, CA, where she managed sales, marketing, customer success and GTM operations across the portfolio of software companies. She also served as the lead, client-facing Partner for the emerging Fintech segment. From 2017 to 2018, she consulted with PwC as an Executive in Residence for PwC New Ventures prior to joining the PwC Partnership. Sheela held a number of increasingly responsible leadership roles in the software technology industry over the 15 years prior to PwC. Ms. Zemlin was the General Manager and Senior Vice President for TIBCO Software in Palo Alto, CA, where she managed a global team across sales and customer success for the SaaS business. Prior to that, she was the Senior Vice President of Sales, Customer Success and Partners at Bill.com (NYSE: BILL) in Palo Alto, CA; the Vice President of Business Development for Taleo, (which was acquired by Oracle); and as Global Vice President, Global Strategy, Senior Director of Enterprise Segment Management, and General Manager and Director of Small Business Market Planning at LexisNexis/Reed Elsevier in San Francisco, CA. Ms. Zemlin earned a degree in operations management from Michigan State University with magna cum laude honors and a MBA from Harvard Business School. Sheela also serves as an Executive Fellow with Harvard Business School where she contributes to the course on Entrepreneurial Sales.