Executive team

The people running the company.

The executive team has built and shipped products in distributed systems, energy markets, and high-performance scientific computing and now operates them at scale for the most demanding customers in the grid.

§ 01
Sean Murphy
Sean Murphy
Chief Executive Officer

Prior to PingThings, Sean built a data science and analytics consultancy that grew to over a million dollars a year in revenue, and previously bootstrapped an email analytics company to over $500K in ARR. Earlier, he was a senior scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory for over a decade, where he focused on machine learning, high-performance and cloud-based computing, and anomaly detection.

He holds undergraduate degrees in honors mathematics (cum laude) and honors electrical engineering (magna cum laude) from the University of Maryland, and graduate degrees in biomedical engineering (summa cum laude) from Johns Hopkins University and business (with Distinction) from Oxford University.

Mike Brown
Mike Brown
Chief Technology Officer

Mike is a hands-on technologist and business leader who has co-founded four venture-backed companies across broadband networking, mobile video, cloud storage, cybersecurity, and AI-assisted digital health. Collectively his teams’ products have served more than 300 million subscribers and earned $3.2B in worldwide sales.

Prior to his startup career, Mike led pioneering systems engineering programs for the DoD and Intelligence communities and was a radar missile guidance and ECM-ECCM engineer. He holds an MBA from Boston University, an MSEE from the University of Southern California, and a BSEE from Worcester Polytechnic Institute.

Lisa Fennell
Lisa Fennell
Vice President of Sales & Marketing

Lisa Fennell is a senior sales and market development leader with more than two decades of experience building strategic partnerships across the North American utility industry. She has led growth initiatives for energy-technology companies ranging from AI-driven analytics platforms to AMI and grid-modernization solutions, consistently securing executive sponsorship and driving adoption among electric, gas, cooperative, and municipal utilities.

Her career includes roles at Bidgely, Osmose, NISC and Landis+Gyr, giving her a uniquely broad network and a deep understanding of utility buying cycles, regulatory drivers, and technology deployment challenges.

A board with operating depth in the industries we serve.

Our directors and advisors run multi-billion-dollar energy investment funds, lead AI investing at one of the world's largest semiconductor manufacturers, ship enterprise IoT software to utilities, and shaped the federal policies that govern grid reliability today.

Board of directors

Capital, governance, and industry depth.

Our directors bring decades of experience in energy investing, deep-tech venture capital, and senior operating roles in industrial technology: the three perspectives we draw on to scale this business responsibly.

§ 02
Paul Winters
Paul Winters
Managing Partner, Petra Funds Group

Paul is the board representative of Three Curve Capital LP, the family office of Stuart Porter, founder and CEO of Denham Capital Management: a $9.5B+ energy and resources investment advisor. He also serves as Managing Director and General Counsel of Denham, with nearly 25 years of experience as a transactional lawyer across the energy sector.

He sits on the boards of Greenleaf Power, a North American biomass-focused IPP, and Endeavor Energy, an Africa-focused thermal and renewable IPP, among others.

Andrew Byrnes
Andrew Byrnes
Director, Micron AI Fund

As Director for Micron’s AI Fund and portfolio manager for Comet Labs, Andrew invests in early-stage AI and robotics startups transforming large industries. His focus is in deep tech, industrial automation, and computing hardware that enables the next wave of machine learning innovation.

Prior to Comet, Andrew founded Stower Energy, a startup applying machine learning to predictive operations and maintenance for distributed energy systems, and was a project manager for utility-scale power developer the Martifer Group. He did graduate work in Materials Science and Engineering at Stanford.

Stu Porter
Stu Porter
Founder & CEO, Denham Capital

Stu Porter is the Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Chief Investment Officer of Denham Capital, a private equity firm focused on energy and mining. He brings over 30 years of senior investment experience and serves on the firm’s Investment Committee and Valuation Committee.

Prior to founding Denham, Stu was a founding partner of Sowood Capital Management and a Vice President and Portfolio Manager at Harvard Management Company, where he focused on public and private transactions in energy and commodities. Earlier, he worked on the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index desk at J. Aron and traded at the Chicago Board of Trade. He holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Shashi Menon
Shashi Menon
Vice President, Digital, SLB

Shashi Menon is Vice President, Digital at SLB (formerly Schlumberger), the largest technology and services provider to the global energy industry. He oversees SLB’s enterprise digital strategy and leads the team responsible for defining, developing, and deploying the company’s digital platform across upstream operations.

Over nearly three decades at SLB, Shashi has built up through software development and technical product management into senior digital and technology roles, including VP of Subsurface Software Technologies, VP of Marketing & Technology for WesternGeco, and VP & Digital Manager for the Exploration & Field Development Platform. His doctoral research at the University of Houston spanned high-performance computing, image processing, and fluid mechanics, a technical lineage that underpins much of what PingThings is building today for industrial-scale time-series infrastructure.

Board of advisors

Operators and researchers who built the field.

Our advisors include the people who write enterprise IoT software for the world's largest utility-equipment manufacturers, who shaped federal grid-reliability policy, and who pioneered the synchrophasor research that PredictiveGrid was built on.

§ 03
Leonard Rainow
Leonard Rainow
VP Software, Hubbell Utility Solutions

As Vice President, Software for Hubbell Utility Solutions, Leonard leads the design, development, and delivery of enterprise-class cloud-native Industrial IoT solutions for electric, water, and gas distribution utilities. He has more than 30 years of experience across both public and private companies, having held leadership positions as CTO and Global Head of Software Engineering at General Electric, Oracle, Selectica, and Manugistics.

Leonard started his career as a software architect at PeopleSoft pre-IPO, and studied applied mathematics at Odessa University.

Cory Baldwin
Cory Baldwin
VP Infrastructure IoT, Bentley Systems
Cory has spent 20+ years developing technology-forward products for the world’s largest and most demanding industries: infrastructure, energy, natural resources, and construction. From novel triple-difference processing techniques for GNSS-based millimeter-level monitoring of critical infrastructure to end-to-end IoT platforms integrating structural, geotechnical, environmental, geospatial, and process sensors, his career has been about practical technology applied to high-stakes operating decisions.
Alison Silverstein
Alison Silverstein
Independent Consultant

Alison is an independent consultant, strategist, and researcher on electric system reliability, resilience, market design, transmission, and technology adoption. Her work on major federal electricity efforts includes the U.S. DOE Staff Report on Electric Markets and Reliability, three national transmission congestion studies, the Hawaii Clean Energy Initiative framework, and the industry-wide advancement of synchrophasor technology.

She served as senior advisor to FERC Chairman Pat Wood III from 2001–2004, co-chairing the 2003 U.S.–Canada blackout investigation, and earlier at the Public Utility Commission of Texas, PG&E, and as a consultant in Washington, DC. She serves on the boards of the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy and the Health Alliance for Austin Musicians.

Dr. Alexandra "Sascha" von Meier
Dr. Alexandra "Sascha" von Meier
Adjunct Professor, UC Berkeley · Grid SME

Sascha is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley, where she teaches Electric Power Systems. She is also Director of CIEE’s Electric Grid program area, focused on power distribution, smart-grid integration, and distributed and intermittent generation.

Her research centers on high-precision micro-synchrophasor measurements for situational awareness, diagnostics, and control in distribution grids, the body of work directly upstream of PredictiveGrid’s storage and stream-processing architecture.

Want to join the team?

We hire builders and sellers. Engineers, data scientists, and domain experts who work on the data infrastructure underneath the energy transition and the physical systems beyond it. Sales, marketing, customer success, and operations who bring it to the operators that depend on it. We're remote-friendly and have been so since the company was founded.