With software and monetization experience at YouTube and Google, Ikkjin Ahn co-founded Moloco in 2013. During his time with YouTube in the monetization team, Ikkjin developed a video profitability prediction system. While at Google, he was the founding Tech Lead Manager for the Android Data team achieving the Google Citizenship award in 2012.
As CEO, Ikkjin sets the strategy and vision for the company. Mr Ahn is often sought out for his opinions on machine learning, data privacy, performance advertising, and growth marketing. He leads the company’s continual investment in machine learning and R&D and has led the company through significant revenue growth, global office expansions and staffing increases while earning recognition as a Great Place to Work and as a Deloitte Fast 500 company. Ikkjin is an advocate for all employees by ensuring that Moloco continues to be an inviting employer that welcomes diversity and provides opportunities for employees to learn and advance their careers.
Ahn is a 2004 graduate of Seoul National University, holds a Master’s Degree from the University of Pennsylvania, and studied Computer Science as a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego.
DJ and Ikkjin Ahn (CEO) met as college classmates in 1997. They both attended the same grad school (UC San Diego) under the same advisor (Prof. Michael Taylor). While Ikkjin left grad school to join Google in 2008, DJ continued to earn his degree and then joined Google’s Cloud Storage team in 2012. He joined Moloco in 2015 and was promoted to CTO in 2016.
DJ manages a global team of site reliability, software and cloud engineers collectively known as Moloco’s infrastructure team. The infrastructure team is instrumental in providing a reliable, scalable, and efficient cloud service for Moloco’s suite of cloud-based services. Recognized by Google as a Customer Award Winner in the cross-industry category, Moloco’s infrastructure demonstrates business excellence and the team’s ability to overcome challenges with innovative thinking and leadership.
DJ earned a Doctor of Philosophy, Computer Science and Engineering from UC San Diego and his BS in Computer Science and Engineering from Seoul National University. He published several technical papers in premier CS conferences like PLDI, OOPSLA, and CGO.
With decades of machine learning and engineering team leadership at Google, and most recently at Snowflake as Machine Learning (ML) Architect, Shaked provides counsel and execution to transform Moloco’s machine learning teams for the future. This includes defining the team’s culture, areas of focus and execution, coaching, and where investments in the team should be made.
Prior to Snowflake, Shaked held Distinguished Engineering roles in two separate tenures at Google where he co-founded Sibyl, a machine learning platform that boasted the most deployed production models, and built the teams responsible for Google’s machine learning platform development. Additionally while at Google, Mr. Shaked co-founded TensorFlow Extended, the next generation ML platform centered around deep learning which soon had 1000+ models trained throughout the company. Mr. Shaked also held a ML role at Lyft.
Prior to his technical career journey, Shaked was a professional chess player and Grandmaster.
Shaked earned an MS from the University of Washington in Computer Science and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Arizona.
Sunil brings more than 25 years of business experience in building commercial and product operations to Moloco where his duties include overseeing all commercial functions across Moloco’s products and platforms.
Prior to Moloco, he served as President and head of Disney+ Hotstar, where he grew the streaming business 8X to 50M+ subscribers, scaled 20+ markets internationally for Disney+ and Disney+ Hotstar across India, Southeast Asia, Middle East and Africa, and led the launch of the next generation Hotstar streaming platform. Before joining Disney+, Rayan held leadership roles at Google for more than seven years where he headed the company’s Global Mobile App ads business and helped build Google Cloud solutions for Games. Prior to that, he was an Associate Partner at McKinsey serving technology clients across a variety of functions.
Brendan Browne leads Moloco’s People Operations and Talent teams. In this global role, Brendan ensures that Moloco culture continues to encompass a people-first approach as it grows its talent base to meet the company’s growth plans.
Prior to joining Moloco, Browne was the Head of Leadership and Executive Talent at Y Combinator where he helped founders in all aspects of recruitment and talent. In his more than a decade of leadership at LinkedIn, he oversaw the talent function as the number of employees scaled from 800 to more than 16,000. While at LinkedIn, he architected the RAMP apprentice program which aided in diversifying the company’s talent, developed and taught a curriculum on the value of storytelling, data-driven recruitment and influencing in business, and assisted in product and sales for the Talent Solutions business.
In previous leadership roles, Browne has led recruitment for Microsoft Research, the company’s world renowned industrial research lab, Deem and Sapient. Browne has also served as an advisor to Pure Storage, and Koru in addition to guest lecturing at Stanford University.
Brendan Browne received his Bachelors of Science (B.S.) from Villanova University with a double major in Communications/Media Studies and Spanish.
As CFO at Moloco, Brandon oversees all financial functions including strategic finances, mergers & acquisitions, investment, and accounting. Brandon believes that sharing financial knowledge with employees provides better outcomes as employees have an opportunity to participate in creating value.
Brandon joined Moloco in 2019 after ten years of advising software and Internet companies on capital markets. He spent eight years with RBC Capital Markets where he held vice president, director and managing director roles. He worked on mergers and acquisitions, value creation and capital markets transactions across many sectors including e-commerce marketplace, social media, advertising technology, digital health, direct-to-consumer brands and on-demand mobility.
Brandon’s early interests were in the legal sector and he obtained his Doctor of Law (J.D.) from New York University of Law and his J.D./MBA in Finance, Accounting, Entertainment, Media & Technology from NYU Stern School of Business.
Barbara Rogan leads Moloco’s global legal team ensuring compliance and assisting leadership in navigating an evolving market and regulatory landscape. Her background includes guiding companies through sustainable growth to increased valuations.
Prior to joining Moloco, Rogan led the legal and compliance teams at several technology companies, most recently as Senior Vice-President and General Counsel at Neophotonics Corporation (acquired by Lumentum Holdings). She has also held senior positions at Velodyne Lidar, Inc., Cadence Design Systems, Inc.,and Loglogic, Inc. (acquired by TIBCO Software).
Rogan earned an LL.M in Intellectual Property Law from Santa Clara University School of Law, a Juris Doctor, (J.D.) from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, and her Bachelor of Arts degree in Government and Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) from Claremont McKenna College.
Bill Michels is responsible for Moloco’s Retail Media Platform, where he oversees both product and business development functions.
Michels brings more than two decades of successful leadership across product management, data strategy, and business development at some of the definitive companies in advertising and search. He was previously EVP of Product at The Trade Desk where touched multiple product areas from identity to CTV. Prior to that he was Chief Data Officer at Foursquare after its merger with Factual, where he was Chief Operating Officer responsible for product, engineering, and data partnerships. Before that he was Senior Director of Product Management at Yahoo! working on search, where he launched and led Yahoo! BOSS, and international search monetization. He also worked at UBS in equity research covering technology and telecom.
Michels holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA from Colby College. Michels lives in Southern California and will work closely with Moloco’s Retail Media business and product teams around the globe.
Sehyuk co-founded Moloco in 2013 after nearly seven years with Oracle. At Oracle he worked on the Cloud Computing, Nimbula and Virtualization teams. During his service with Oracle, he was involved in many machine learning and cloud computing projects.
At Moloco, Sehyuk oversees the largest, global team consisting of machine learning engineers, data scientists, and data engineers.
Sehyuk obtained his BS from Seoul National University and went on to study computer science and machine learning at Stanford. He is distinguished by being a world finalist in ACM ICPC World Finals 2004, where each year an elite group of the brightest collegiate problem solvers on the planet comes together to compete in the top tier of the International Collegiate Programming Contest. Additionally, Sehyuk was a Gold medalist at the International Olympiad in Informatics in 1998, a silver medalist in 1996 and a medalist in the National Mathematical Olympiad in 1998 and 1999.
Hoon-Jung works closely with CEO Ikkjin Ahn on key strategic priorities for the company. She works with the entire leadership team to continuously improve company-wide communications, collaboration, and execution. Hoon-Jung is passionate about creating an inclusive, empowering company culture.
Prior to Moloco, Hoon-Jung served in leadership roles at Google for over eight years. As a Founder & General Manager of a product in Area 120, Google’s in-house incubator, Hoon-Jung led a team of software engineers, product and program managers, UX research and design leads and other cross-functional partners to build and launch a product internally that was acquired by Google. Hoon-Jung also served as an Investment Partner in Area 120, where she evaluated pitches for new products at Google and mentored Founders in Residence and team leads. Prior to joining Area 120, Hoon-Jung was a Senior Counsel at Google, where she advised executives across Payments, Google Play, and YouTube on expanding access to digital payments and e-commerce and represented Google vis-a-vis financial regulators globally.
Prior to Google, Hoon-Jung was Senior Vice President and Associate General Counsel for Citigroup Global Capital Markets, where she advised on strategic FinTech investments and led the global legal & compliance teams supporting Citi Velocity, Citi’s flagship web and mobile platform for institutional clients. Hoon-Jung began her career as an associate at Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP, where she worked on complex public & private M&A deals, securities offerings, joint ventures and strategic alliances, litigation matters (including a landmark copyright infringement case on fair use, Blanch v. Koons), and advised the Republic of Korea on the US-Korea Free Trade Agreement (KORUS FTA).
Hoon-Jung earned her J.D. from Harvard Law School, where she was an editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology and a two-time recipient of the Derek C. Bok Certificate of Distinction for excellence in teaching economics to undergraduates at Harvard. She earned an A.B. in Social Studies (Economics and Political Philosophy) from Harvard University, magna cum laude & Phi Beta Kappa.
David spearheads Moloco’s growth and revenue strategy to help advance the company’s mission of democratizing machine learning solutions for companies of all sizes. In his role, David assesses and develops new market areas for Moloco’s machine learning technology.
With a deep understanding of global marketplaces, tech, and monetizing ad platforms, David has consistently delivered 100%+ revenue growth for several companies throughout his career. He joins Moloco from Fyber, a leading mobile app monetization platform, where he served as Chief Revenue Officer (CRO). Prior to Fyber, David served as a member of Sampler’s board of directors and held various business development positions across different marketing and media organizations, including Jounce Media, Oath, and Turn.
David holds a BA in Business Administration from California Polytechnic State University.
Francesco Renzo joined Moloco in June 2022 as the Vice President of Go To Market, supporting sales and driving global growth strategies.
Previously, Francesco worked at Google on Revenue Analytics, building and growing the apps sales team in the US, and driving the Channel Partner Strategy and Operations. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey in Milan, Shanghai CN, and Boston, focusing on Marketing and Sales for B2B.
Francesco grew up in a small town near Naples, obtaining his Master’s degree in Finance in Milan. Outside of work, Francesco spends time with his family and enjoys being an avid motorcycle rider.
Daisuke leads Moloco’s global marketing teams including product marketing, communications, growth, and brand. Yokokawa also serves as the site lead for Moloco’s Singapore office.
As a senior leader with experience in consumer and business marketing in the global technology sector, Daisuke brings a track record of growing businesses and brands through strategy design, launching innovative marketing programs across the customer life cycle, and building championship teams in geographically distributed and diverse cultures.
Daisuke has held senior marketing roles at Meta, as Director of Marketing for Southeast Asia & Emerging Markets, and at Google, where he held product and business marketing positions in the US and Japan.
Based in Singapore, Daisuke is a graduate of Keio University (Tokyo).
Nikhil has been in the retail media space since early 2012. Just before joining Moloco, Nikhil was a partner at Bain & Company where he established and led the retail media practice globally. Prior to Bain, Nikhil was on the founding leadership team of WalmartLabs where he started Walmart's retail media business, WMX. He started his career more than 2 decades ago as an aerodynamics engineer at Jaguar Racing F1.
As Vice President Retail Media, Nikhil will focus on building Moloco's retail media business and collaborating with customers to scale their ad revenue.
Nikhil has a Bachelor's degree from IIT Madras in India and Master's degree from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, both in aerospace engineering. He also has an MBA from Harvard Business School.
With nearly two decades of experience in various finance leadership roles, including mergers & acquisitions and investor relations, Mr. Murali helps drive the next stage of Moloco's growth. He is responsible for overseeing, planning, and directing the company’s path to achieving consistent, predictable, long-term financial growth. Working closely with the company's business and product teams, Shailesh looks to invest organically and inorganically as well as develop and execute Moloco’s longer-term financial and partner strategy.
Most recently, Shailesh was the head of corporate development and served as the head of investor relations at DXC Technology. He previously served as Managing Director and Head of Software Investment Banking at the Royal Bank of Canada. Prior to that, he worked at Barclays, Lehman Brothers and Nortel Networks.
Mr. Murali holds his MBA from UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School and graduated from Birla Institute of Technology and Science with honors in Civil engineering and Chemical engineering.
Yina brings nearly two decades of experience in financial strategy and operations to Moloco. Her experience in building and scaling fast growing companies has been instrumental to Moloco’s favorable financial position today and future growth. Yina established Moloco’s Finance functions and currently leads the company’s global FP&A, sourcing and core finance operations, reporting to the CFO.
Prior to joining Moloco, Yina served in senior finance leadership positions at Visa, Credit Karma and Nitro, where she led multiple transformation initiatives and made significant contributions to the companies’ success.
Yina holds an MBA in Finance, Global Business and Investment from Duke University, Fuqua School of Business, and a BSc in Computer Science.
With more than 25 years of experience building and transforming rapidly growing companies’ finance operations, Dharti brings a unique skill set and expertise in leading finance through milestone changes, including mergers and acquisitions and public company readiness. She previously served as CAO at Momentive (formerly SurveyMonkey), where she played an instrumental role in SurveyMonkey’s successful IPO in 2018. Dharti also held multiple finance roles during her 12-year tenure at Yahoo!, ultimately serving as the media giant’s Senior Director of Financial Planning and Analysis for the Americas.
As the company’s Chief Accounting Officer, Dharti will oversee Moloco’s global accounting function, financial reporting and tax function and help drive the revenue strategy and overall financial health.
Dharti earned her BA in Accounting and Finance from Georgia State University and is a licensed Certified Public Accountant in the state of Georgia.
Rudy leads the information technology function at Moloco. Under this remit, he is responsible for all IT operations and management of comprehensive security, privacy, risk and compliance programs. Rudy brings a wealth of experience from his previous senior positions at Drift, Credit Karma, Navigent and Simplee. He was also the co-founder of StoredIQ prior to its acquisition by IBM.
Rudy’s passion for Internet safety and risk mitigation is reflected in his outside contributions. He has contributed to Fintech: Growth and Deregulation, published by Risk Books (UK) and provides consulting to privately held, early stage technology ventures, blockchain, NFTs, and crypto currencies & tokens through Apogee Risk Management.
Rudy obtained his JD, Law from The Catholic University of America, Columbus School of Law and his BSc, Engineering Mechanics from the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. Rudy is also a member of the State Bar of New Mexico, an ISO 27001 Lead Implementer, and holds numerous certifications from the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, Internal Association of Privacy Professionals, Certified Information Systems Security Professional, The Institute of Internal Auditors and is registered with the State of California as a private investigator.
Sid is a passionate operator with an exciting journey, which has taken him to very diverse industries and countries. Before joining Moloco to set up the India business, he had built and scaled the Intercity food delivery business of the Indian food delivery platform Zomato. He has previously worked in the Government of India as Chief of Staff to the Deputy Finance Minister. Sid has been a banker at Deutsche Bank and a management consultant at Bain & Co, where he specialized in financial services in South-East Asia. He has also driven strategic business initiatives for Disney’s APAC team and the Indian streaming app Hotstar.
Sid has a Bachelors and Masters in Technology from IIT Delhi, a CFA charter, and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He stays in Gurgaon (India) with his wife. Sid is an avid traveler, a passionate foodie, and has done stand-up comedy shows!
As Head of Japan Business, Tatsuo leads the New Business and Growth team and is responsible for the growth of Moloco's DSP business in Japan.
Tatsuo joined Moloco in 2021 after ten years experience in several global advertising/marketing technology companies expanding in Japan. He took charge of Google AdMob business in Japan as Mobile Business Strategist for 4 years. After Google, he led the market entry and expansion of AppLovin and Smartly.io as the first local hire, growing their business from scratch and building the local team. Tatsuo was also one of the launching members of Lion Studios, the hyper-casual game publishing business under AppLovin, taking care of the business development with gaming development studios across the globe.
Tatsuo earned his BA in Economics from University of Tokyo in 2008. His first career out of college was in Corporate Planning Department at Rakuten, and he was part of the M&A and budget planning team.
In his spare time, Tatsuo enjoys unloading videos on his YouTube channel (Tatsuo Sakamoto's Startup Bar) and making angel investments in startup companies.
Yu-Sien Low is the Head of Business for South East Asia (SEA) and Australia & New Zealand (ANZ) at Moloco Singapore. She will play a key role in growing Moloco’s business in the region and has deep expertise in partnering with digital marketers to achieve critical business objectives such as user acquisition and re-engaging past users to maintain loyalty.
Prior to her current role, Yu-Sien was the Head of Account Management for Greater China and SEA at Moloco. She has 16 years of experience in advertising technology companies like Criteo and Google with roles encompassing digital marketing strategy, growth and account management, as well as display and search advertising in ad technology and programmatic advertising.
As one of the founding members of Criteo’s Singapore office, Yu-Sien was instrumental in laying the company’s commercial foundations in the region. Being an Account Strategist at Google for 7 years, she is skilled in driving operational excellence for SEA and analyzing data trends to identify opportunities and develop implementation plans.
Hyun Chai is currently responsible for leading the 'Scaled Growth Enablement' team at Moloco, where he facilitates the achievement of scalable growth within the organization's business operations. Prior to this role, Hyun Chai was instrumental in establishing Moloco's South East Asia business and served as the leader of the Korea and APAC DSP business teams for a period of four years.
Hyun Chai brings a wealth of experience to his role, having worked in various capacities for prominent technology companies such as Google and Meta, where he gained exposure to both the supply and demand sides of advertising businesses in Korea, Singapore, and Ireland. Additionally, he previously served as a Product Manager at SK Telecom, the leading mobile telecommunications company in Korea.
Ben brings more than 15 years of business experience in building new markets and customer facing teams to Moloco where his duties include heading up the sales and growth management teams in the EMEA region.
Prior to Moloco, he served as Managing Director, Central Europe for AppsFlyer, where his team grew the business by more than 300x in 6.5 years to an 8-figure-SaaS-ARR across 20 countries. His responsibilities included Sales, Customer Success, Marketing and Partnerships. Before joining AppsFlyer, Jeger held leadership roles at Fyber for more than 4 years where he headed up EMEA’s client services teams.
Ben received his BSc. and postgrad certificate from Manchester Business School in Management and lives with his wife and two sons in Berlin.
Molly Passanisi joined Moloco as a seasoned leader with extensive expertise in the digital marketing industry. With over 25 years of experience in global business operations and strategic planning, Molly brings a wealth of knowledge and skill to her position.
Previously, Molly held the position of Global Client Director for Google Marketing, where she oversaw media strategy and advertising sales for Google's digital marketing endeavors on owned and operated platforms. In her role, she managed teams located in major international cities such as San Francisco, New York, London, Dublin, and Singapore. She was instrumental in scaling global digital advertising programs, while also staying at the forefront of technological innovation with initiatives such as live streaming events, AR media executions, and the use of AI and machine learning for creative optimization.
Prior to her tenure at Google, Molly spent eight years in the video game industry, collaborating with prominent console and PC gaming companies to bring their marketing to life online in partnership with publishers such as IGN, Rotten Tomatoes, and MySpace.
Molly holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business with a concentration in Marketing from Boston College Carroll School of Management, as well as certification from Stanford University's Executive Program.
With over 25 years of advertising sales experience, Dock brings a wealth of adtech sales knowledge to Moloco. In his role, Dock is responsible for the sales growth of Moloco’s demand side platform including management of the sales, account management, and customer success teams. Dock has been instrumental in Moloco’s global revenue growth.
Dock’s background in the programmatic advertising world includes vice president positions at IronSource, Nielsen and Business.com. Through his tenure at these companies he has helped some of the world’s premiere customer brands increase their monetization opportunities while significantly generating ad revenue.
Dock serves on the IAB Advertising Committee and co-chairs the App Marketing Group.
