Former Akamai SVP to lead the unified runtime company; co-founder Stephen Goldberg transitions to board role
DENVER, Oct. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Harper, the company behind the unified runtime for apps, agents, and data, today announced that Lelah Manz has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, effective immediately. Manz succeeds co-founder Stephen Goldberg, who will continue to serve on Harper's Board of Directors.
Manz joins Harper after nearly two decades at Akamai Technologies, most recently as Senior Vice President and General Manager of Data and Shared Services, where she led a global team delivering data, AI, and shared platform capabilities. During her tenure, Akamai grew from a $250 million content delivery provider into a $4 billion global platform spanning security, compute, and data services. She also serves as Chair of the Board of Directors at APIContext.
"Harper has done something the rest of the industry is still trying to figure out: it put the database, the cache, and the code inside the exact same process," said Manz. "When an AI agent has to make ten reasoning steps in a row, or a commerce site has to load fifteen dynamic pieces of data, making network calls back and forth across separate systems completely kills performance. Harper eliminates that latency by keeping data and logic in the same local memory space, answering queries in milliseconds with zero network hops. That's why Fortune 50 retailers depend on it today, and why it is the exact foundation modern enterprise AI needs."
The appointment follows a period of strong momentum for Harper. In the last 12 months the company was:
- Named a Sample Vendor in the Gartner® Hype Cycle™ for Digital Commerce (2026) in the Front-End Cloud category
- Received an Honorable Mention in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud-Native Application Platforms (2026)
- Released the core Harper technology under an open-source Apache 2.0 license at OpenJS Conf NA.
- Launched Harper Fabric, Harper's managed cloud platform offering multi-region replication, intelligent routing, and automated failover.
- Continued to expand its partnerships with Akamai, other edge compute partners, along with strategic integrators globally.
"When we started Harper, we really were just trying to solve a problem of workload management at scale," said Goldberg. "Where Harper is today with millions of people interacting with Harper on a daily basis as foundational technology is beyond our wildest expectations, and taking the company to the next stage requires someone who has scaled a platform business to billions in revenue. I believe Lelah is that person and I could not be more confident in handing her the keys, and I look forward to supporting her from the board."
"Lelah brings a rare combination: she has built and run global platform organizations at scale, and she has spent years working directly with the enterprises Harper serves," said Jay Hirsh, Managing Partner of Break Trail Ventures. "The board conducted a thorough search, and Lelah stood out as the leader to take Harper from category pioneer to category leader."
Manz brings deep expertise across product, engineering, and sales organizations, along with an extensive understanding of the B2B technology ecosystem and global go-to-market strategy.
About Harper
Harper is the unified runtime for apps, agents, and data. By running the database, cache, application logic, and messaging in a single in-memory process, Harper keeps data in the same place as the code that uses it, delivering roughly one millisecond data retrieval, 30 to 70 percent faster page loads, and up to 85 percent fewer LLM calls. Enterprises in e-commerce, media, and financial services run production applications and AI agents on Harper. Harper is headquartered in Denver, Colorado. Learn more at harper.fast.
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SOURCE Harper
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