GridGain Leadership

Mark Lockareff serves as GridGain’s President and CEO, driving the company’s strategy and long-term vision, and leading the next phase of rapid growth. 

Mark has served dozens of companies as a CEO, senior executive, board member, advisor, and venture capital investor in the SaaS, enterprise infrastructure, big data, storage and cloud markets, including Totango, a Customer Success Management company.

 Previously, Mark co-founded ClearPath Partners to provide CEO coaching/advisory services to venture backed technology companies, served on the Investment Committee of Black River Ventures, a European VC firm that focuses on trans-Atlantic mid-stage technology investments, and was Entrepreneur-In-Residence with Almaz Capital Partners. Earlier in his career, Mark was a Managing Director with Bridge Advisory Partners, an advisory firm he founded in 2008 that provided CEO, mentoring, board of director, and executive chairman services to high potential, expansion stage venture, and private equity backed technology companies. While at Bridge, Mark served as the interim CEO at Nexenta, ParAccel, Agiliance, and Apptera. Prior to Bridge, Mark was a Venture Partner at Meritech Capital Partners, a $2.6 billion venture capital firm. Before Meritech, Mark was a Founder and Managing Director of GameChange Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm affiliated with Accenture and Softbank that focused on enterprise software investments. Prior to that, he was VP, Corporate Development at Excite@Home and VP & GM of Classified Advertising for Excite. Earlier in his career, he was VP&GM at Classifieds2000, a product manager at Echelon, an investment banker at Salomon Brothers, and started his career in sales at IBM. 

Over his career, Mark has led and supported venture capital investments in: Acopia, AmberPoint, AudienceScience, Facebook, Kanisa, Lyten, Model N, ProofPoint, Quigo, Riverbed, and Softricity. 

Mark holds a BS in Electrical Engineering and Economics from Stanford University, and an MBA from the University of Chicago.

Lalit Ahuja is responsible for the direction, implementation and delivery of GridGain’s technology strategy. He works closely with GridGain customers and partners worldwide and leads the Engineering, Product Management and Delivery teams in ensuring GridGain products and services meet or exceed all customer expectations.

In his career spanning over 25 years, Lalit has led various IT functions including enterprise architecture, product management, large scale program management, IT operations and served as a digital strategy advisor to executives at Fortune 500 enterprises.

Prior to GridGain, Lalit led the global Customer Success team at Akana, a leader in API Management and Application Services Governance space, where he was responsible for increased customer retention and more than 300% growth in Akana’s consulting services business.

Lalit holds a Master’s degree in Engineering and an MBA from UCLA.

Jim LoDestro leads all GridGain Go-To-Market activities, including global sales strategy and execution, to drive revenue growth, increase market share, expand sales channels, and foster strong customer relationships. Previously, LoDestro held leadership positions in multiple companies in the database, big data, analytics and AI/ML industries. Prior to joining GridGain, he was Chief Revenue Officer at Aerospike, a real-time NoSQL database company. Earlier in his career, he held similar roles at Responsys and Hyperion Solutions and was SVP Worldwide Sales at Janrain, a user management platform provider. 

Jim holds a BA in History from the University of Rochester, and an MBA from Babson College.

Katherine Rincon has more than 25 years of technology marketing experience as an executive and manager, and is passionate about real-time data and infrastructure software. Prior to joining GridGain, she served as the CMO at Unit21, a Gradient Ventures- backed startup redefining how risk and compliance teams fight financial crime.

Before Unit21, she held executive management roles at Rapyd, a fintech startup focused on cross-border transactions; Striim, a streaming data integration and intelligence platform for real-time operations and decisioning; and PubNub, a developer API platform that powers the real-time infrastructure in apps. She also held executive management positions at SL Corporation, Embarcadero Technologies, and WebLogic / BEA Systems, and senior management roles at NetDynamics and Visa.

Rincon has Bachelor of Arts degrees in both Quantitative Economics and French Literature from the University of California, San Diego, and an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business. She enjoys travel, swimming, rowing, American football, and Formula 1.

Elena Schtein is GridGain’s Chief Financial Officer managing all financial actions of the company including annual audits, reporting, M&A, fundraising due diligence, revenue recognition, forecasting, general ledger, consolidations, cash management, risk management, US and international taxes and equity. She is credited with building the company’s finance infrastructure from the ground up, including team recruitment and operational processes. Most recently, she and her team played an instrumental role in facilitating multiple venture capital funding transactions for GridGain.

Elena thrives in fast-paced environments working with early- to mid-stage companies in need of financial processes, corporate infrastructure, and KPIs for growth. Elena’s career spans more than 25 years, working in both privately held and publicly traded companies focused on enterprise software, SaaS, and other banking technology. Before joining GridGain Systems, she served as Corporate Controller for both SpaceTime Insight and Porter Novelli, and as Director of Revenue for ON24.

Elena holds a BS Degree in Accounting with a Minor in Statistics from the State University of Economics and Finance in Saint Petersburg, Russia. She’s a dog-lover, who admits to spoiling her Standard Poodle, Alby.

Yuri Yudin leads the engineering, architecture, and quality assurance teams at GridGain. He has over 25 years of experience in software development, design, and architecture at various large enterprises and startups. He specializes in distributed systems, data analytics, security, networking and performance tuning.

Prior to GridGain, Yury was Director of Engineering at WANdisco where he led development and testing of their Big Data and ALM product lines. Before WANdisco, Yury spent 10 years at Intel managing cross-site engineering teams in the development and performance tuning of managed runtime environments on a wide range of Intel platforms. Prior to Intel, Yury held various engineering and management positions at Sun Microsystems, HyCube, Tepkom, Transas Marine and others.

Yury holds a Master’s degree in Mathematics from the Saint Petersburg State University, Russia where, for a number of years, he also gave lectures on Informatics, programming languages, and modern computer architectures.

Michelle Costa leads GridGain’s Human Resources efforts. With over 18 years of experience in all aspects of Human Resources including sourcing, staffing, compliance, compensation, employee relations, and benefits, Michelle has a proven record of managing company growth, developing business partnerships, and implementing management best practices.

Her progressive roles in HR have given her the opportunity to drive impact in many different work environments, including smaller start-up organizations as well as large international corporations. Before joining GridGain Michelle held roles in HR in the FinTech and Data Management industries which gave her the opportunity to drive impact in many different work environments, most favorably small to mid-size, start-up organizations.

Michelle holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology from Chico State University.