Former Tesla Executive Susan Repo Joins MariaDB as First COO to Supercharge Business Operations

Repo brings proven track record of operational and management excellence to MariaDB during unprecedented pace of database innovation

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. and HELSINKI – December 19, 2019 – MariaDB® Corporation today announced Susan Repo as the company’s first Chief Operating Officer. Repo joins after leading an auto fintech startup and spending five years at Tesla, where she steered the company through its hyper-growth global expansion of electric vehicles and sustainable energy products. At MariaDB, Repo will draw on that experience to oversee and accelerate the company’s business operations as it delivers on new product innovations. 

“Susan’s outstanding background and demonstrated capabilities will be key as we reach an even higher level of operational excellence while engineering cloud-first solutions and continuing to scale,” said Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB. “Her business and operational leadership experience is perfectly suited for the pace with which MariaDB is taking our enterprise database platform to new heights. I look forward to working closely with Susan as we excel in all aspects of the business.” 

The addition of Repo to MariaDB’s leadership team comes during a period of unprecedented innovation and growth. This year, MariaDB delivered a hardened version of the popular MariaDB Server that meets the highest security, stability and scalability requirements, leveraged Kubernetes as a core component of MariaDB’s cloud, and united transactions and analytics. MariaDB also expanded its North America presence with a new Silicon Valley headquarters and doubled headcount in the last 18 months to support a growing customer base around the world. The largest global MariaDB event of the year, MariaDB OpenWorks, brought technology leaders from Samsung, Walgreens, Nokia, Alibaba, Facebook and others together to share best practices in building modern applications with MariaDB.

“There is a drive to innovate, determination to win and commitment to customer success inside MariaDB that you just don’t find at many companies,” said Repo. “MariaDB is setting a new standard in database technology that addresses the challenges companies face today with modern application development. I am excited to contribute by working closely with the leadership team as we grow the business and continue to deliver advanced solutions for our customers.”

Repo was most recently with auto fintech startup, DriveOn, where she was CEO and President. Previously, Repo served as Corporate Treasurer and VP of Finance at Tesla, where she raised over $11 billion of Tesla’s capital, negotiated key incentives establishing legal presence and governance across Tesla’s organizations globally, scaled the finance organization and co-led the acquisition of SolarCity in 2016. Earlier, Repo held various finance and legal management positions in the high-tech arena, including with Juniper Networks and Agilent Technologies. 

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About MariaDB Corporation

MariaDB frees companies from the costs, constraints and complexity of proprietary databases, enabling them to reinvest in what matters most – rapidly developing innovative, customer-facing applications. MariaDB uses pluggable, purpose-built storage engines to support workloads that previously required a variety of specialized databases. With complexity and constraints eliminated, enterprises can now depend on a single complete database for all their needs, whether on commodity hardware or their cloud of choice. Deployed in minutes for transactional, analytical or hybrid use cases, MariaDB delivers unmatched operational agility without sacrificing key enterprise features including real ACID compliance and full SQL. Trusted by organizations such as Deutsche Bank, DBS Bank, Nasdaq, Red Hat, ServiceNow, Verizon and Walgreens – MariaDB meets the same core requirements as proprietary databases at a fraction of the cost. No wonder it’s the fastest growing open source database. Real business relies on MariaDB™.