SANTA CLARA, Calif., March 17, 2022 — Propel, creator of the Product 360 cloud solution, announced two key executive hires following record customer growth for the fiscal year end January 31, 2021.  Eric Schrader joins as Chief Product Officer and Mitesh Kapadia joins as Vice President, Professional Services. The new hires join Propel as the company expands its roster of innovative technology, medical and life sciences, manufacturing, and consumer goods customers.

“Our customers have emerged from the pandemic, are focusing on growing revenue, and are strengthening their supply chain,” said Ray Hein, CEO of Propel. “We saw tremendous acceleration in new business in the second half of 2021, and it’s continuing in the first quarter of 2022. The addition of Eric and Mitesh will help Propel customers harmonize product and business processes to streamline their businesses and increase profits.”

Eric Schrader joins Propel as Chief Product Officer. With 25 years' experience in enterprise software, Schrader will lead Propel’s strategy for product and customer success. He previously held executive roles as Chief Customer Officer at Betterworks, and Vice President of Global Professional Services at Coupa Software. Schrader's experience scaling companies at Agile Software and Coupa has been recognized through his inclusion as a Customer Success Fellow at Sapphire Ventures, and as a Fellow in Stanford University's Distinguished Careers Institute from 2019-2020.

Mitesh Kapadia has been named VP of Professional Services. Kapadia will leverage his 20 years’ experience in deploying enterprise software at scale to meet the needs of Propel’s expanding customer base and to develop its partner ecosystem. He was previously Vice President of Professional Services and Partner Enablement at Stardog, and Head of a Global Center of Excellence at Reltio. Kapadia’s experience includes global supply chain operations at Motorola, and services delivery to several industry-leading brands.  Kapadia began his career at Accenture.  

“As a new investor in Propel with its Series C round we were impressed with Propel’s grasp of both current and future needs for product companies,” said Jared Smith, general partner, Ankona Capital. “Ray understands how to build and scale a dominant company, and strengthening the team is the first step in what will be another great year for Propel.”  

Propel continues to expand across all target industry segments. Recent corporate highlights include:

• $20 million in Series C financing - led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from existing investors Norwest Venture Partners, Cloud Apps Capital Partners, Green D Ventures and TIFF, joined by new investor, Ankona Capital, a venture capital firm with experience in both supply chain and scaling enterprise B2B SaaS solutions.
• Introduction of Product 360 - the first pure cloud approach to address lingering deficiencies of traditional PLM, QMS, and commercialization tools.
• 2022 JMP Hot 100 list recognition - ranking the best privately held software companies based on financial growth, products and services, leadership, customers, and market potential. Propel was also named to the Hot 100 list in 2020.
• Propel named #77 on Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ – the 500 fastest-growing technology, media, telecommunications, life sciences, fintech, and energy tech companies in North America.
• Kirsten Allegri Williams, CMO of Optimizely and former CMO of SAP Success Factors and SAP Ariba, joined the Board of Directors.
• Jared Smith, general partner at Ankona Capital and former CEO of Avetta, joined the Board of Directors.
• Jitterbit partnership - Jitterbit named Propel’s preferred solution for ERP integrations catering to small, medium, and mid-market manufacturers, including NetSuite, Infor, JD Edwards, Microsoft Dynamics, and others.

To learn more about Propel, please visit propelplm.com.

About Propel

Propel enables Product 360, the modern way to evolve products from concept to customer. Born in the cloud and built on Salesforce, Propel fuels collaboration across the entire value chain to deliver the right products to market faster, at higher margins. As a trusted partner to hyper-growth startups like Desktop Metal, Imperative Care, and Inari Medical, corporate pioneers such as Traeger, Simplisafe, and Vizio, and Fortune 500 leaders Shell and Zoetis, Propel drives innovative product success. For more information, visit propelplm.com and follow us on LinkedIn.  

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