BrightDrop Appoints Three New Executives To Its Management Team

BrightDrop, GM’s all-electric delivery venture, just announced it is appointing three new executives to its management team. All three executives bring extensive experience in the technology space, with more than 20 years of expertise in machine learning, autonomy, robotics, cloud, embedded, consumer, and enterprise applications. The three new hires will assume their new roles effective immediately, and will be based at BrightDrop’s headquarters in Palo Alto, California.

The new hires include Akash Varshney, who takes on the role of Chief Product Officer, leading both BrightDrop’s Product Management and Design / Research (UX / UI) teams. Varshney previously served as global executive VP of Product Management at Anaplan, where he helped to scale the business to nearly $1 billion in revenue. Prior to Anaplan, Varshney served as head of Product Management at Amazon, where he launched a variety of different products, including Amazon Key SmartHome and Connected Car. Varshney also held roles at Yahoo and Motorola Mobility.

Meanwhile, Lili Kan will take on the role of Vice President of Software Engineering, and will be responsible for BrightDrop’s Software Engineering roadmap, including cloud, mobile, and in-vehicle software, plus delivery intelligence, simulation, data insights / analytics, and more. Kan previously served as head of Engineering, Payment Intelligence at Stripe, where she lead large-scale ML-based systems and products to evaluate and protect billions of payment transaction activities. Prior to Stripe, Kan led the Uber Insurance and Driver Safety teams, as well as engineering at Uber Advanced Technology Group in the area of product strategy and next-gen fleet management, plus self-driving applications.

Finally, Aaron Leiba takes on the role of Vice President of Hardware Engineering, where he will be responsible for BrightDrop’s Hardware Engineering and embedded systems development. Leiba previously served as head of Engineering at Agtonomy, an AgTech startup, where he led autonomy software development and hardware / embedded efforts. Aaron also held a position at Postmates, where he pioneered a robotics sprint process and led design iterations for autonomous delivery robots in urban environments. Leiba’s resume also includes various roles at Intel, Apple, and Google.

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