Panzura has a new CEO

Hybrid cloud file services supplier Panzura has a new CEO, Karthik Ramamurthy, capping an eventful period of exec changes since the start of the year. He replaces ultra-marathon fan Dan Waldschmidt.

The company supplies its Cloud FS (Cloud File Services) and Symphony data services products. Cloud FS, billed as the world’s fastest global file system started out as a file sync-and-share platform, with file services layered on top of an object storage core. Symphony discovers and manages exabyte-scale unstructured – file and object – datasets, with scanning, tiering, migration, risk, and compliance analysis features.

Since the beginning of the year:

• Chris McBride, VP North America Sales, went in Jan 2026 and was replaced by George Axberg (ex-VAST Data).
• Karthik Ramamurthy hired as Chief Product Officer in Jan 2026. He was a VC/PE advisor and at Veritas, EMC and NetApp before that.
• Sundar Kanthadai, CTO, goes Feb 2026 and joins a stealth startup.
• Mike Zolla joins as VP Technical Strategy in Jan 2026 (ex-VAST Data).
• CEO Dan Waldschmidt gone this month, April 2026.
• Ramamurthy promoted to CEO in April 2026.

There is no CMO, COO, CTO or CRO.

Exec chair Guy Churchward said: “Karthik has the right clarity of vision on what it takes to drive market leadership in enterprise data management. Elevating him to CEO reflects our confidence in Panzura’s technology and our commitment to a product-centric growth strategy. He is the right leader to move the company and our customers forward."

Panzura has historically competed with CTERA, Egnyte and Nasuni. Egnyte has concentrated on its enterprise market niche while CTERA and Nasuni outgrew Panzura which was then positioned as a cloud storage gateway with its Freedom Cloud NAS product. The company languished and, in 2020, the several VCs who owned Panzura threw in the towel and sold it to Profile Capital, where a team led by sports entrepreneur Jill Stelfox took over and, as she said, re-founded and re-invigorated the company. She was both executive chairwoman and CEO.

The Stelfox era lasted until 2024 when the Profile people replaced her with Dan Waldschmidt, a Stelfox hire, as CRO and then Chief Transformation Officer. At that time ex-EMC executive Guy Churchward became the executive chairman. 

Waldschmidt says that, as CRO, he: “Built and executed the revenue engine that moved Panzura from its initial market position into the enterprise segment. Designed the go-to-market strategy, restructured the sales organization, and aligned marketing around enterprise buyer cycles. Directly led to a series of record enterprise deals, record quarters, a 150% year-over-year increase in customer base, and doubled customer lifetime value.” 

He achieved 485 percent revenue growth in his 3 years as CRO, and then became Chief Transformation Officer to scale up the company’s operations. He says he:

• Achieved a 4x increase in enterprise engagement by strategically refocusing engineering efforts
• Reorganized the worldwide support structure, resulting in an 83% reduction in critical issues within 65 days
• Implemented pragmatic AI solutions to enhance the customer experience.

In his time as CEO, January 2024 to April 2026, he “rebuilt the executive leadership team, restructured go-to-market, and repositioned the company's enterprise hybrid cloud data platform in a competitive market. Led multiple successful rounds of funding — both equity and debt-based.”

He sums up his time at Panzura like this: ”The arc at Panzura — revenue leader to transformation officer to CEO — is the same pattern that defines every turnaround: find what's broken, fix the system, scale the outcome.”

His focus now “is acquiring stressed and distressed businesses — companies trading at a fraction of their last enterprise value. Not because the opportunity disappeared, but because leadership, process, or strategy failed. The infrastructure to win is already there. Execution broke down. That's what gets fixed.”

Exec chairman Guy Churchward tells us that, in the Waldschmidt era, Panzura solidified its core market and offering and is now looking outwards to a broader market. The organization has been deliberately flattened for better communications. The product strategy has now developed to focus on a customer’s risk, proactive governance and data sovereignty when they use agentic AI. There’s much more news to come.

Ramamurthy said: “Unstructured data is now the backbone of AI and enterprise transformation. The next wave of innovation will be defined by how effectively organizations can operationalize that data. At Panzura, being customer-first and product-led means we are building directly against those needs. My priority is to accelerate our leadership in AI-ready data, scale through our partner and channel ecosystem, and help customers turn their data into a true strategic advantage.”

Panzura says the latest CloudFS v8.7 positions the platform as a foundation for agentic AI workflows. It's building toward a future where enterprises can apply AI directly to their existing file data, retrieving project history, benchmarks, and institutional knowledge from a single governed platform.