- Mairead O’Donovan joins from Atlassian, where she was Head of Jira Work Management and Head of Growth
- Søren Abildgaard joins from Zendesk, where he was Executive Vice President of Engineering
- Both executives will be based in Europe and working closely within Contentful’s Berlin hub
Contentful, the leading content platform for digital-first business, has strengthened its executive team with the recent addition of two senior executives from industry-leading software companies as the company continues to invest in its content platform following a funding round totaling $175 million that took its valuation to over $3 billion last summer.
The recent hires include Mairead O’Donovan, who joined Contentful as the company’s Chief Product Officer after leading product and growth in roles at Atlassian and Microsoft. Søren Abildgaard has joined as Executive Vice President of Engineering after leading engineering teams at Zendesk, Adobe and Autodesk.
O’Donovan has nearly two decades of experience in product strategy and innovation with an impressive track record of managing product teams at hyper growth SaaS businesses. Previously, O’Donovan held leadership roles at Atlassian, including serving as Head of Jira Workflow Management as well as Head of Growth, where she was responsible for founding new Atlassian products and businesses. O’Donovan got her start in the technology industry working in product management at Microsoft, where she launched products for Bing, XBox and Microsoft Visual Studio, Microsoft’s integrated development environment for developers.
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“I’m very excited to be joining Contentful during this period of growth and momentum,” O’Donovan commented. “We have the opportunity to provide all digital builders – developers, designers and content creators – the tools that will enable them to create, build and deliver content in a modern and differentiated way. We have the opportunity to invent the next generation in this new era of composable content.”
As Contentful’s Executive Vice President of Engineering, Abildgaard will lead the company’s engineering team and work alongside O’Donovan and Co-Founder and CTO Paolo Negri to continue developing Contentful’s platform on a technical level. This comes after four years as head of engineering at Zendesk, where Abildgaard was responsible for leading the company’s engineering teams in building out the product portfolio and platform that allowed the company to rapidly scale to serve thousands of customers and grow to more than a billion dollars in revenue over the time he spent in leadership.
“Contentful has the potential to take the way content is orchestrated and delivered by digital builders to a new level,” said Abilgaard. “As an engineer, it is important to me to be able to contribute to a platform that is redefining the way businesses build to win in this digital first era. I am very excited for the challenge and opportunity in front of us.”
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The arrivals of O’Donovan and Abildgaard come as Contentful continues on a path of rapid growth. With more than 540 new employees coming on board since the beginning of 2020, Contentful now has an over 750-strong workforce that is spread across three key hubs in Berlin, Denver and San Francisco, as well as distributed throughout North America, Europe and Australia. Contentful’s App Marketplace, which allows builders the ability to extend and expand the capabilities of Contentful’s platform through third-party integrations and custom workflows, has seen an increase of over 150% of apps created in the Contentful Marketplace since the beginning of 2021. The platform now performs an average of 1.8 billion API calls a day for over 30% of the Fortune 500 and thousands of other brands, partners and organizations around the world.
“As our lives continue to be immersed in digital environments, the world is reliant on digital experiences to connect and communicate,” said Steve Sloan, CEO of Contentful. “With Mairead and Søren coming on board and the momentum we are seeing in our platform, we’re well-positioned to offer our customers and partners the ability to create content experiences on our platform that help them build authentic engagement with today’s consumer.”
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