Udacity Strengthens Executive Team With Two Key Hires, Announces New Chief Product Officer And Chief Of Staff

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 16, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Udacity, the online learning and talent transformation platform powering the careers of the future, today announced the additions of York Poon as Chief Product Officer and Aparna Vemuri as Chief of Staff to its executive team. York joins with more than twenty years of experience in building innovative products, most recently from the AI-powered talent intelligence platform eightfold.ai. Aparna brings more than a decade of operations experience, joining from the edtech company Degreed. With these new hires, Udacity has formed a strong leadership team that positions the company as a magnet for top talent.

York will oversee Udacity's Product, Design and Content teams, utilizing his product experience from companies such as eightfold.ai, Globality, Upwork, and Elance. While at eightfold.ai, he worked closely with public, private, and government entities, which he will continue to do as Udacity expands its growing enterprise and government client base. In addition, York brings unmatched expertise in building category-defining enterprise platforms through innovative products and technology that inspire businesses to develop and attract top talent.

"Udacity's focus on building strong skills-based programs means that global companies can continue to deliver on digital transformation initiatives by upskilling employees in cutting-edge areas such as AI, cybersecurity, and data science," said York. "As I join the team, I'm looking forward to using my experiences to help shape Udacity's product and cement our market leadership position."

In her role as Chief of Staff at Udacity, Aparna will oversee the company's operational rhythms, processes, and procedures, furthering Udacity's operational excellence as a skills-based education provider to students around the world. She brings over a decade of experience in Customer Experience and Operations, including her previous role at Degreed, where she served as the VP of Business Operations. She has also led solutions engineering organizations from infancy to maturity at 3 different growth stage start-ups, including Branch and Kahuna.

"Udacity is obsessed with building a better way to learn digital skills — which suits my own passion in using metrics to design better processes and, by extension, even better products," added Aparna. "It's an exciting time to be joining the company as we continue to power this global digital transformation."

Udacity is the global leader in combining real-world projects, proprietary content created with industry, a global marketplace of experts, and an online technology platform that enables affordable self-paced learning that is customizable and extensible to both institutions (enterprise and government) and individual learners. With more than 1.5M skills trained and 15,000 hours of proprietary content, Udacity delivers on its mission to train the world's workforce in the careers of the future.

"York and Aparna bring enormous talent and passion to an already incredibly talented executive team, and I'm confident that they will accelerate Udacity's growth trajectory," said Gabe Dalporto, CEO of Udacity. "York brings extensive experience building enterprise platforms that focus on talent transformation, and Aparna brings operational expertise that will improve processes and unlock efficiencies across the global organization."

About Udacity
Udacity is a global, online training platform powering digital transformation and accelerated time-to-market initiatives for Fortune 500 and Global 2000 enterprises. Udacity programs provide industry-created practitioner skills through a series of "Nanodegree" programs consisting of online courses and real-world projects in artificial intelligence, machine learning, data science, autonomous systems, and cloud computing, among other disciplines. Udacity collaborates with expert instructors and over 200 global industry partners including AT&T, Google, Facebook, Mercedes-Benz, and NVIDIA to power technical education. Headquartered in Mountain View, Calif., the private company has operations in the United Kingdom, Egypt, Germany, India, and the United Arab Emirates. Udacity has raised $163 million in funding to date from investors including Bertelsmann, Andreessen Horowitz, Charles River Ventures, and Drive Capital. For more information, please visit www.udacity.com.

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SOURCE Udacity