Corgi, a San Francisco insurance startup that went through Y Combinator in 2024, began this year with a projected revenue run rate of about $45 million and, according to Forbes, expected to finish the year near $450 million.
Growth on that curve strains every process a company has, and the executive usually responsible for keeping those processes intact is the COO.
In 2026, companies were hiring for this role again. According to Russell Reynolds’ Global COO Turnover Index, businesses appointed 146 new COOs, the most in seven years.
Average tenure has stretched to 4.1 years, the longest since the firm began tracking it, and about 80% of COO roles at S&P 500 companies go to internal candidates, people who already know where a company’s processes break.
At startups, the job role in many cases looks different. The COO is often one of the first senior hires, and scaling means building finance, legal, hiring and support functions. At a services firm, it can mean opening a delivery center in a new country and filling it with engineers within months.
The 15 COOs to watch in 2026 are each scaling something specific this year, from nearshore engineering hubs in Mexico and Colombia to AI-native insurance, legal review and payroll platforms.
Several of their companies opened new offices, raised large rounds or reorganized their leadership in the past 12 months, and the COO is the executive charged with making that growth hold.
Brad Lightcap, formerly OpenAI
Brad Lightcap joined OpenAI in 2018 as its finance chief, after working with Sam Altman at Y Combinator, and became COO in 2022. He built the first versions of most of the company’s business teams, including finance, legal, people, security, go-to-market, government affairs and partnerships.
In August of this year, he announced he was leaving after roughly eight years to “start something new,” closing one of the most closely watched operating careers in tech.
David Burns, Sharon AI
Sharon AI, the Australian AI infrastructure company listed on Nasdaq, named David Burns COO effective September 7, 2026. He arrived after signing season: in July and August the company announced five-year cloud contracts worth $1.32 billion and $373 million.
Burns spent more than 35 years at companies including IBM and Telstra, most recently as group executive of Telstra Enterprise. “AI is moving at a pace unlike any technology shift I’ve experienced in my career,” he said when the appointment was announced.
Rajeev Ranjan, Ness Digital Engineering
Rajeev Ranjan, COO at Ness Digital Engineering, spent about 25 years at Infosys, rising to executive vice president and running its manufacturing business in India and Japan, before joining Ness as COO in August of 2023. He oversees global delivery, engineering excellence and the firm’s talent supply chain.
Those responsibilities grew in October of 2025, when Ness, a global leader in bringing intelligence to data and software engineering, opened its Mexico headquarters in Guadalajara.
Maria Camila Ramirez, Ontop
Maria Camila Ramirez is COO of Ontop, the startup that lets companies hire, pay and manage contractors around the world without setting up local entities.
Over the past two years the company has focused on growing efficiently, reaching profitability. That model puts operations at the center of the company’s growth: as more businesses use Ontop to run international teams, Ramirez’s job is to make sure the platform, the payments and the people behind them scale.
Emily Heath, Glow
Glow, an endpoint security startup founded in 2025, came out of stealth in July 2026 with a $180 million Series A at a $1.2 billion valuation, backed by Sequoia, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks and Redpoint. Its COO, Emily Heath, was previously chief information security officer at United Airlines and Docusign, sat on Wiz’s board through its sale to Google, and was a partner at Cyberstarts.
The Palo Alto company has nearly 100 employees, about 70% of them in Israel, and its deployments typically cover tens of thousands of devices, so Heath is scaling a team split across two countries as fast as customers roll the product out.
Rick Folgmann, Get Covered
Rick Folgmann was head of operations at Hippo Insurance during the run-up to its 2021 public listing through a merger with Reinvent Technology Partners Z. He brought that experience to Get Covered in April 2023, joining the New York insurtech as COO to oversee day-to-day operations as it expands in multifamily housing. He’s long been looking to a thought leader on scaling.
Get Covered is the AI risk platform for property management that removes the administrative burden from site teams and maximizes operating income. Folgmann’s 25 years in financial services show in how he describes the job: making insurance easier to buy and easier to monitor.
Bob Reisenweber, Source Meridian
Bob Reisenweber is COO of Source Meridian, a software firm that builds big data, analytics and machine learning applications for life sciences and healthcare clients, among others. The company has hundreds of engineers across offices in suburban Philadelphia, Medellín, Rionegro, and Quito.
Running that footprint means keeping HIPAA and CCPA compliance consistent across four countries, and Source Meridian has helped clients earn SOC 2 and HITRUST certifications alongside its own.
Rachi Messing, Altorney
Rachi Messing co-founded Altorney in 2022 with his brother Shimmy to fix how companies staff document review for litigation, investigations and compliance, and he serves as the company’s COO. The company runs two solutions: Attorney’s platform for vetted legal reviewers, and MARC, a document intelligence platform.
In a benchmark against a Fortune 500 company’s fully manual review, Altorney says MARC cut total review costs by 62% and finished a three-week job in three days. Scaling both of the platforms falls often to Messing.
Suresh H P, Sonata Software
Sonata Software named Suresh H P its COO in April of this year, in a move that also made Rajsekhar Datta Roy the company’s CEO in May. An IIT Kanpur graduate with more than 35 years in IT, Suresh held leadership roles at Infosys, Motorola and LTIMindtree before joining the Bengaluru-based firm.
His portfolio covers hiring, automation, IT infrastructure, data privacy and information security, along with setting up innovation hubs and training leaders.
Tyler Simpson, Noosphere Labs
Tyler Simpson left Meta to co-found Noosphere Labs, a Seattle-area startup working on what it calls human-centered physical intelligence, and became its COO when the company announced its leadership team in October 2026.
He spent more than 11 years at Microsoft and was previously co-founder and CTO of Luum, which HealthEquity acquired. At a company this young, his job starts with building the operating structure from the first hire.
Cooper Keller, Divergent Technologies
Divergent, the Los Angeles manufacturer that 3D-prints vehicle and aerospace structures, promoted Cooper Keller to COO in June 2026.
His remit runs from application engineering and program management through supply chain, quality assurance and production, which makes him responsible for turning Divergent’s printing technology into parts that customers can order at volume.
Joel Molinoff, iCOUNTER
Dallas-based cybersecurity company iCOUNTER named Joel Molinoff COO in June 2026. He brings nearly 30 years in security and risk, including roles at the NSA and the White House, six years as CBS Corporation’s chief information security officer, and a stint growing third-party risk products at BlueVoyant.
iCOUNTER builds threat intelligence aimed at targeted attacks and financial fraud, including in clients’ supplier networks.
Emily Yuan, Corgi
Emily Yuan co-founded Corgi with CEO Nico Laqua in 2024, and the company won approval to operate as a licensed insurance carrier in July 2025. The money followed quickly: a $108 million seed and Series A in January 2026, a $160 million Series B in May and a $106 million extension in June, when Corgi was valued at $2.6 billion and running at about $100 million in annualized revenue.
Alongside its San Francisco headquarters, the company now has offices in Salt Lake City, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, New York and London, an operating footprint that sits with Yuan.
Alice Choi, Prezent Vivo
Prezent Vivo, the Palo Alto company that pairs purpose-built AI with human experts to produce scientific and medical communications, named Alice Choi COO in September of 2026. Choi started in academia, earning a master’s degree and a PhD, then spent many years working in medical communications, building her career at McCann Health and within the Omnicom network and serving as a COO before this role.
Prezent Vivo already works with more than 150 life sciences companies, including 45 of the world’s 50 largest biopharma organizations, and Choi’s job is to scale delivery across its AI software, expert services and flexible consumption models without losing the scientific precision those clients require. CEO Rajat Mishra called her “a powerful force in expanding Prezent Vivo’s presence in the market.”
Disclosure: All COO profile images were taken from LinkedIn
Featured image: AI-generated illustration
