Rick Gruenhagen is a CTO with $2.2B+ in successful exits, specializing in AI-powered SaaS platforms and critical infrastructure software across water, energy, and industrial operations. He advises growth-stage, middle-market companies on platform architecture, AI strategy, and exit readiness.
His AI/ML experience spans nearly two decades, and he specializes in AI governance, including how enterprises establish data foundations that make AI outputs defensible, auditable, and trustworthy in regulated and high-stakes contexts. He has published on AI governance and data foundation architecture, including semantic layer design, data lineage, and the organizational prerequisites for defensible AI deployment in regulated industries.
During his distinguished career, Rick was CTO at Innovyze, where he led the digital transformation that drove a 4x increase in company value, culminating in Autodesk’s largest-ever acquisition at $1B. He built Info360, a cloud-native SaaS platform, from the ground up in under twelve months—transforming legacy water infrastructure software into a modern operational analytics platform serving utilities globally. He also led data science in addition to engineering and product, building the ML Ops platform in close partnership with Amazon SageMaker’s product team, and integrated the Emagin team’s ML surrogate modeling capability that reduced hydraulic simulation from days to seconds.
At Spireon, he scaled the connected vehicle IoT platform from 500,000 to 4 million vehicles across four business verticals, driving a $530M exit to Greenbriar Equity Group. At Impinj, Rick built the software engineering function from the ground up, developing the technical vision for ItemSense—an enterprise IoT platform that was instrumental in the company’s $750M IPO.
Rick’s foundation includes senior leadership at Microsoft and Amazon Web Services. At Microsoft, he led global teams across Azure SQL DB, Office 365, and Bing cloud infrastructure—including early applied AI work during the Live Search-to-Bing transition, one of the first enterprise-scale applications of machine learning to search relevance and personalization. At AWS, he was a second-level report to Andy Jassy and led the Amazon Payments Billing transformation.
Rick is a former Lieutenant Commander in the U.S. Navy, where he was an F-14 Naval Flight Officer (Air Medal). He is also a former MIT Assistant Professor of Naval Science and serves as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Chapman University’s Leatherby Center for Entrepreneurship.
He received his M.S. in Computer Systems Engineering from Boston University and his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics from the University of Minnesota.